Unsharp universe
Feb. 1st, 2005 09:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinThe Cassini Picture of the Day finally gets around to showing a version of the recent Rhea photos processed for public consumption (they promise a true-color version, but it doesn't seem to have materialized; here are my attempts).
I probably shouldn't pick on these people, as they are very busy and are doing a pretty good job of getting pretty pictures out in between the actual scientific work. But what's the deal with the extreme unsharp mask they put on these pictures? It's so intense that it's creating a weird-looking bright band at the horizon. (For those who are not digital-photography buffs, the unsharp mask is a type of sharpening technique that you can do in Photoshop or equivalent; it apparently has origins in traditional photography, something I did not know until just now.)
They did the same thing with Iapetus. I suppose it does make the topography stick out more, but at the cost of some unrealism, and they probably could have done just as well with a smaller mask radius. I'm pretty sure that my quasi-true-color picture (the really gray one) is closer to what you'd see if you were out there looking at Rhea.
I probably shouldn't pick on these people, as they are very busy and are doing a pretty good job of getting pretty pictures out in between the actual scientific work. But what's the deal with the extreme unsharp mask they put on these pictures? It's so intense that it's creating a weird-looking bright band at the horizon. (For those who are not digital-photography buffs, the unsharp mask is a type of sharpening technique that you can do in Photoshop or equivalent; it apparently has origins in traditional photography, something I did not know until just now.)
They did the same thing with Iapetus. I suppose it does make the topography stick out more, but at the cost of some unrealism, and they probably could have done just as well with a smaller mask radius. I'm pretty sure that my quasi-true-color picture (the really gray one) is closer to what you'd see if you were out there looking at Rhea.