"fighting The Surf" Panorama In Color, Save Oppy's Soul in the sand sea Options

[Nirgal]

As Steve said: "get used to the current scenery ..."

so I decided to make the best out of it
Especially the latest dune-panorama posted by dilo inspired me to the
following hand-colorization:



Links to the higher resolution version


It's a pity that the pancam-parts are only downsampled EDRs ...
OTH, if we remain stuck, I'm sure we'll get more than enough high-res
views of that place :-/

P.S.: I'm also working on a color version of the
whole 360degree panorama ...

[Nirgal]

here is the full 360 degree pan in color:


full resolution panorama (1MB)

detail crop of the "dinosaur tail" dune:

[dilo]

Nirgal, incredibly, I discovered this thread only now!
When I posted my PanCam mosaic, suggesting you to colorize it, I didn't imagined this superb result! I'm deeply deliced and I want deeply thank you for citation!
...One day, I hope, you will illustrate in detail your technique to us .
Regards!

[Nirgal]

Nirgal, incredibly, I discovered this thread only now!     
When I posted my PanCam mosaic, suggesting you to colorize it, I didn't imagined this superb result! I'm deeply deliced and I want deeply thank you for citation!
...One day, I hope, you will illustrate in detail your technique to us  .
Regards!

Thanks for the kind words, dilo

I'm still working on the perfection of the colorizing techniques ...
It's a mixture of (pseudo-)intelligent colorizing algorithms
(hard-coded in plain C language
and a lot of brush hand-work in the details & fine tuning ...
Each individual b/w picture is a difficult challange to obtain "realistically looking"
color results without additional filter informations ...

Often enough, I'm not very satisfied with results (many tries with hundreds of different color hues and shades until it feels to look "right"...

For getting my overall "inspirations" for the general look&feel of the Martian colors
I'm often looking at the beautiful real/multi-filter color images posted
by other experts and color Wizards like djellison, Horton or on Daniel Crotty's (slinted) great site.
Also the many fantastic navcam-panoramas posted here (Tman, dilo and others) are often rewarding invitations to add the colors to them

Still, some images succeed more than others ... it often depends on the nature of the original b/w image: your panorama, for example with the fine contrast-rich dune patterns,
was one of those where I immediately thought would be a good target for
colorization ...

BTW.:My latest attempt is to bring color to some Microscopic Imager views
(methuselah and jib close-ups look promising

Long term goal would be to publish some kind of "coffee-table"-book with the best color images of the Mars missions (more "artistically oriented" than the usual
kind of space-book, less text, more images) ... but I'm afraid it won't be easy to find publishers for such a project ...