They are not deceptive in the least. Skepticism is fine, but your question comes from a fundamental lack of understanding. As an example, when you see a pretty

They are not deceptive in the least. Skepticism is fine, but your question comes from a fundamental lack of understanding. As an example, when you see a pretty picture of Mars in a magazine, it's composed of dozens or hundreds of individual images, captured as long, thin image strips, as a satellite orbits the planet. Those images come in looking absolutely nothing like the final product. You're viewing a rectangle, but the source data represents a strip along the surface of a sphere. It needs to be rectified, aligned to dozen of other such strips, and projected on to a flat surface. Unless you're projecting these images back on to a sphere, there's a whole lot of stretching and alignment going on. The images are taken at different times of the day, during different seasons. Software needs to balance the albedo so that it doesn't look like a Picasso painting. Most NASA images are false color, because they are not taken with normal optical cameras. Much of the good science comes from imaging outside the human visual spectrum. The THEMIS instrument on Mars Odyssey images 10 infrared spectral bands, none of which can be seen with the human eye. Other instruments record ultraviolet light. There is no way for humans to see any of this data, so they pick three spectral bands and assign them to red, green, and blue so that humans can see something. Different band selections produce different images of the same area and serve to emphasize different minerals or other natural materials. Science is done on all bands of the data, but pictures help provide context. The raw data for all these images are freely available to anyone, but asking to see the "real" image before it's been processed is a meaningless request. There is no such thing as a "true image".