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The "sepia" is actually true color. New Horizon's high resolution camera takes black and white photos, but NASA sometimes releases them supplemented with color

by semiel 11y ago

The "sepia" is actually true color. New Horizon's high resolution camera takes black and white photos, but NASA sometimes releases them supplemented with color information from other sensors.

hohenheim 11y ago
Thanks. It turns out the coloured pictures are taken by Ralph [1]. One of the three cameras on New Horizon. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-camera-behind-the-new-horizons-pluto-photos-ralph/398549/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-ca...
nkoren 11y ago
Argh, I was just preparing to write a rant about this. No, it is absolutely not true-color -- although this is something which NASA insists on claiming, to its detriment. It annoyed me when they used the same technique to show a "true color" view of the surface of Titan[1], and it's annoying me again now. What this image shows is the average color Pluto. The colour information comes from a much lower-resolution image, which was unable to resolve color differences between regions. In truth, Pluto could be wildly multi-colored -- but these kind of images, tagged with the "true color" label, lead you to think that that Pluto (and Titan) are a boring uniform sepia. To understand just how wrong it is to label these images as "true color", try the following experiment: 1: Find a nice colorful picture of, say, a rose garden. 2: On a satellite image, find the color-value of that rose garden at, say, a spatial resolution of 50km per pixel. 3: Take the color-value of that pixel -- which, on earth, will range from a muddy greyish-brown to a muddy greyish-blue -- and apply that hue to the entire image. You will now have a very sorry-looking rose-garden. 4: Release the image accompanied by a press release claiming that this is a "true-color" view of said rose-garden. See the problem with this? Honestly, the folks at NASA are geniuses, but they really need to stop doing this kind of thing. One thing they don't understand very well is human perception and psychology. If you show people a greyscale image, they will assume that it represents something which is actually more colorful, and their imagination can take it from there. On the other hand, if you show people an image which is colorised with a uniform color, they will assume that is the actual color -- especially if you've then gone on to tell them that it's a true-color image. In truth, it's no more "true-color" than the final image in the rose-garden experiment above. This, unfortunately, convinces people that they're looking at something far more drab than they actually are. Tl;dr: Where NASA lacks actual color imagery, they really shouldn't colorise pictures with a uniform hue and then call them "true color". It's bordering on false to do so, and results in images which are much more drab than a simple black-and-white image would be, and possible much more drab than reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)#/media/File:Huygens_surface_color.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)#/media/File:Huyge...
- blowski 11y ago
  Actually, I thought the black and white were the real colours until somebody pointed it out. I really don't see the damage in releasing a sepia version of the picture. Why should I care that it's inaccurate? It's a postcard from the other end of the solar system.
  - lmm 11y ago
    If you don't care about accuracy why take a photo at all? Just draw something, it'll probably be more interesting.
  - nkoren 11y ago
    The genius which goes into getting these images is astonishing, and I'm not meaning to disparage that at all! The damaging part is when they colorize an image and then call it "true color", when this is simply untrue. As an example, here's an actual true-color image of the earth: http://imgur.com/EEt635V.jpg http://imgur.com/EEt635V.jpg And here's a "true-color" image of Earth, produced using the New Horizons / Huygens colorization technique of combining a greyscale image with very low-resolution color data: http://imgur.com/IOqOTyw.jpg http://imgur.com/IOqOTyw.jpg What's wrong with this? A.) It flat-out isn't "true-color", and NASA shouldn't be spreading inaccurate information, and B.) It's arguably a more boring image than the greyscale original (http://imgur.com/hwYA6VK.jpg http://imgur.com/hwYA6VK.jpg), which leaves one better able to imagine possible color schemes, rather than fixating one upon a single, inaccurate, and very boring color scheme.
    - mih 11y ago
      Thanks you make a distinction and the pics really drive home your point. I guess the problem is the label 'true color' which has stuck for a long time to a refer to statistically determined hues. Maybe we should label 'actual true colors' as 'real color' in order to make the distinction. I suppose true color started out as a way to distinguish them from artistically rendered/painted images.
- lucozade 11y ago
  Maybe they're just using the average value of true?

by semiel 11y ago

The "sepia" is actually true color. New Horizon's high resolution camera takes black and white photos, but NASA sometimes releases them supplemented with color information from other sensors.

hohenheim 11y ago

Thanks. It turns out the coloured pictures are taken by Ralph [1]. One of the three cameras on New Horizon. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-camera-behind-the-new-horizons-pluto-photos-ralph/398549/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-ca...

nkoren 11y ago

Argh, I was just preparing to write a rant about this. No, it is absolutely not true-color -- although this is something which NASA insists on claiming, to its detriment. It annoyed me when they used the same technique to show a "true color" view of the surface of Titan[1], and it's annoying me again now. What this image shows is the average color Pluto. The colour information comes from a much lower-resolution image, which was unable to resolve color differences between regions. In truth, Pluto could be wildly multi-colored -- but these kind of images, tagged with the "true color" label, lead you to think that that Pluto (and Titan) are a boring uniform sepia. To understand just how wrong it is to label these images as "true color", try the following experiment: 1: Find a nice colorful picture of, say, a rose garden. 2: On a satellite image, find the color-value of that rose garden at, say, a spatial resolution of 50km per pixel. 3: Take the color-value of that pixel -- which, on earth, will range from a muddy greyish-brown to a muddy greyish-blue -- and apply that hue to the entire image. You will now have a very sorry-looking rose-garden. 4: Release the image accompanied by a press release claiming that this is a "true-color" view of said rose-garden. See the problem with this? Honestly, the folks at NASA are geniuses, but they really need to stop doing this kind of thing. One thing they don't understand very well is human perception and psychology. If you show people a greyscale image, they will assume that it represents something which is actually more colorful, and their imagination can take it from there. On the other hand, if you show people an image which is colorised with a uniform color, they will assume that is the actual color -- especially if you've then gone on to tell them that it's a true-color image. In truth, it's no more "true-color" than the final image in the rose-garden experiment above. This, unfortunately, convinces people that they're looking at something far more drab than they actually are. Tl;dr: Where NASA lacks actual color imagery, they really shouldn't colorise pictures with a uniform hue and then call them "true color". It's bordering on false to do so, and results in images which are much more drab than a simple black-and-white image would be, and possible much more drab than reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)#/media/File:Huygens_surface_color.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)#/media/File:Huyge...

blowski 11y ago
Actually, I thought the black and white were the real colours until somebody pointed it out. I really don't see the damage in releasing a sepia version of the picture. Why should I care that it's inaccurate? It's a postcard from the other end of the solar system.
- lmm 11y ago
  If you don't care about accuracy why take a photo at all? Just draw something, it'll probably be more interesting.
- nkoren 11y ago
  The genius which goes into getting these images is astonishing, and I'm not meaning to disparage that at all! The damaging part is when they colorize an image and then call it "true color", when this is simply untrue. As an example, here's an actual true-color image of the earth: http://imgur.com/EEt635V.jpg http://imgur.com/EEt635V.jpg And here's a "true-color" image of Earth, produced using the New Horizons / Huygens colorization technique of combining a greyscale image with very low-resolution color data: http://imgur.com/IOqOTyw.jpg http://imgur.com/IOqOTyw.jpg What's wrong with this? A.) It flat-out isn't "true-color", and NASA shouldn't be spreading inaccurate information, and B.) It's arguably a more boring image than the greyscale original (http://imgur.com/hwYA6VK.jpg http://imgur.com/hwYA6VK.jpg), which leaves one better able to imagine possible color schemes, rather than fixating one upon a single, inaccurate, and very boring color scheme.
  - mih 11y ago
    Thanks you make a distinction and the pics really drive home your point. I guess the problem is the label 'true color' which has stuck for a long time to a refer to statistically determined hues. Maybe we should label 'actual true colors' as 'real color' in order to make the distinction. I suppose true color started out as a way to distinguish them from artistically rendered/painted images.
lucozade 11y ago
Maybe they're just using the average value of true?