What exactly does the imread() function read?

Does the imread() function read the value of each pixel of the specified image? Or something else?

[Pawel Jastrzebski]

Have you read here:

[Doc] imread output

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

It gets the value of all the pixels and puts them into a 2-D monochrome array or a 3-D color array.

[Guillaume]

or even 4-D array for CMYK encoded TIFF images. As per Pawel link, it's all explained in the documentation.

[Walter Roberson]

I have seen some people report 4d for tiff RGBA as well.

Correction: I have seen some people report rows x columns x 4 for RGBA.