3 ms·
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 a
by 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 agoThanks 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.