Why is this on Hacker News?
It's a cool "aha! moment" when you realize that using Look-Up Tables you can implement any Single-Point image transformation entirely using array lookup operations (no if statements or nonlinear math).
The OP seems weird - it's clearly a beginner asking, but the answers assume an understanding of spatial frequency and Fourier transforms. I think it would be more intuitive to explain in terms of convolutions with small kernels.
And I love reading about applications of linear algebra like this. Makes me want to write my own image processing algorithms as practice.