This document discusses, among other things, systems and methods that track overall time for processing operations such that the processing time can be shared among the resources in an efficient manner. Processing time can be shifted to image processing where the time will provide the most benefit to image quality. Moreover, access time from one process is banked to be used by a subsequent process or on a subsequent group of pixels.This document also discusses, among other things, systems and methods that provide additional processing power on an as needed basis. In an example, a processing stage and its controller are outside the normal pixel processing flow path. When it is determined that additional processing is required, the processing stage and its controller are activated to perform the additional processing.This document further discusses, among other things, systems and methods that provide parallel processing in a processing stage such that the data can flow internal to the controller linked to the processing stage and data can flow globally.