totally. while OpenCV is really useful and magical (i did learn a lot of theory from the OpenCV tutorials though), it didn't help me wrap my head around concepts, but implementing the algorithms (gaussian blur, edge detection, etc) without having fully grasped the math helped a whole lot with understanding how things work. i still can't explain the math behind edge detection, for example, but i can describe how it works. when i wrote this, i had in mind a person who would like to get a big picture idea of what image processing is, and will hopefully be inspired to learn what happens under the hood.