methods and apparatus are provided for accurately imaging , assessing and measuring a patient &# 39 ; s macular pigment . a multiband filter is employed in combination with a color digital fundus camera to provide a method that operates with a single imaging exposure . the multiband filter has bandpass regions within spectral ranges of the red , green and blue detectors of the ccd array employed within the fundus camera , the bandpass regions being sufficiently sharply defined so as to avoid regions where the ccd detector responses spectrally overlap . this provides three discrete channels of grayscale data corresponding to the bandpass regions of the multiband filter , which can be used to calculate macular pigment topographically . methods are also disclosed for calculating the optical density of the macular pigment and advantageously displaying the resulting data .