Mars color

[Groundloop]

@utilitarian,

Al tough I agree with PGWDP that most of the images has jpg artifacts still some of the images has
a very high degree of "blur" that is not in relationship with the byte size of the image. If we take a good
1024 x 1024 x 16 (bit) black and white image and jpg compress that image down to approx. 700 Kbyte,
the image will still look much better than the "raw" images posted for Spirit and Opportunity. The ICER
compression used by the rovers computer IS capable of compressing to almost lossless images. The
main reduction in quality is when NASA take the already ICER compressed images and then compress
them again to jpg.

But there is another worrying aspect with the "raw" images on the jpl web site. I have reason to believe that
all of the images has gone through a computer graphic process called rendering. The "raw" image is computed
and then the rebuilt using computer graphic modeling. You just "build" the image by adding layers onto the
background. Attached is a image released on the web that shows what happen when the computer program
crash and just the unfinished image is posted. (Yes, people do make errors.) Here you can clearly see that only
some of the layers in the image was added. I have also attached a image without the errors for comparison.
(I had to compress the image a lot to fit the 100K requirements on this forum.)

The image at left was posted on the Opportunity web site at Sol 38. A couple of days later a new image was posted,
this time corrected without any rendering faults. What I'm trying to say here is that there is more to this than just jpg
artifacts.

Groundloop.

[Koen1]

Fred:  OK, let's distribute these photos here
Bob:  Wait, I see a soda can here, and there is a guy's arm in the shot over there, see?
Fred:  No problem, we'll just photoshop that out.
Bob:  Don't bother, we have like 6000 photos that don't have soda cans or people in it, let's use one of those
Fred:  No, Bob, don't you get it, we need to use the photos with suspicious stuff in them and photoshop them, it's better that way

Burt: Yes, that makes sense, we did that with the moon pictures too.
Fred: Hmm you've got a point there... Ok, here's the folder of pictures with soda cans and stripmines on them. Better take
the clearest ones and just smudge them a bit.
Burt: Don't take the ones with too much stuff on them eh, otherwise it'll be very messy once we overlay the transparencies
we photoshopped out of old war movies.
Bob: Oh right I nearly forgot about that. Which one are we going to use today?
Burt: Schedule says today we're using shots from "Ben Hur" and "The Dirty Dozen".
Fred: Oh good, at least we won't get people phoning in like they did after we used "E.T." shots...
Bob: Well it depends eh, we still haven't run into any trouble for pasting that propellor airplane on those moon pics.
Burt: Yeah, nor for that face we put on Mars. Some idiot actually made a career out of that, can you believe it?
Fred: Well whatever, just make sure you overlay that artifact layer. That always kills every investigation, just
pointing out artifact layers. How long wil it take the politicians to grow enough brains to understand you can just
overlay such a layer?
Burt&Bob: Haha, well forever apparently... They still haven't figured out that you can't get exactly the same
background picture when you walk back to your moon lander after an hours walk... It seems they simply
can't put two and two together.
Fred: Hehe you guys are right....
Bob: Ah what the heck, le's just use one of those pics that show the stripmine, people are too stupid to see it anyway.
Burt: Good call.

[Groundloop]

@Koen1,

This Spirit crop never stops to amuse me. LOL

Groundloop.

[Koen1]

Lol nice one

I stil like these, the "Apollo8 Lunar Base photo"
and the "Apollo20 Flyby over Crashed Ancient Spaceship"
(from the "famous" video)

[Groundloop]

@Koen1,

As far as I remember there was no Apollo20 so the "Crashed Ancient Spaceship" video is most probably a fake.

My crops IS from web posted JPL/NASA images.

@raburgeson,

This is your thread and it is called "Mars color" so I will try to stay on topic.
Attached is a crop from a Spirit image. I have tried to remove as much jpg artifacts
and "blur" as human possible. The outcome is the image attached. I have rebuilt the
three black/white Spirit images (taken with red,blue and green filters) as good as I could.
Then I have croped the image and resized it 3 times. (The image is then recompressed
to jpg to get it smaller than the 100K requirement of this web forum.)

Groundloop.