Photoshop processed pictures of Mars

Photoshop re-processed pictures of Mars

The backgrounds of the images above (outside the box) were all dark black when I origionally processed it on 19 August 2003. There was also no trace of that ugly black triangle now easily visible in the top left of the second image.
So I reprocessed the origional raw image of Mars after my monitor calibration on 8 September 2003
If your monitor is calibrated according to gamma 2.2 (the Windows and Internet default), the images below will look like this:

a bit dark
a bit light with a slight purple/maroon tint
just right (according to my taste)

Image of Mars below left: 250 best raw frames stacked by K3 CDD Tools
False color image of Mars right: created using Iris and the raw image on its left

This text refers to the images of Mars outside the box above:

From left to right:

My best effort at processing immediately after I captured the AVI
Mars with some extreme unsharp masking applied in order to show maximum detail. Ugly but detailed.
Mars with less unsharp masking, less contrast, and some beautiful color added.

Unfortunately tonight was too cloudy to take any pictures of Mars.

So I took one picture of Mars I took on the 16th of August and spend some time reprocessing it in Photoshop.

In my opinion the third picture of Mars is the most beautiful. So I think my (and your) pictures does not have to be (over-)processed to show maximum detail to be beautiful.

The second picture is ugly since it is oversharpened. It also has too much contrast.

The last picture of Mars looks much better since it can do with a little bit more sharpening as well as a little bit more contrast.

I have seen a number of pictures taken with telescopes smaller than my 10 inch that were more beautiful than mine.

I would rather have more beautiful pictures than highly detailed pictures.

Mars 16 August 2003 <<< - - - Mars webcam pictures index - - - >>> Mars 19 August 2003