[X] My Assistant

[elakdawalla]

New images released!

And raw images at various processing levels from PJ1 are now in the JunoCam gallery.

[Matt Brealey]

mcaplinger : Thank you, I’m really very glad you liked the article! I too was incredibly surprised at just how relevant the toolset ended up being for this type of work. In VFX, image quality is really the number one priority, so the tools used to manipulate raw film plates are really designed with that in mind. Using those same tools for the Juno imagery was entirely analogous to the process I’ve completed many times in the past, although if I’m honest I have to say I found these results much more interesting! You are entirely correct as well that this could all be done in Photoshop, although the scripting/expression-driven nature of Nuke really helps automate some of the slightly more laborious parts of the process.

And thanks for the clarification on the ‘calibration marks’! They were in-fact really quite useful in terms of showing off a very common part of the process, however I’ve now updated the article just to keep it as factual as possible.

One question I do have - in VFX we often shoot a checkerboard/grid pattern in order to test/view the distortion that is present in a given lens. I was wondering if any such images were taken for Junocam/if that’s a common part of your process, too?

Gerald : First of all, I would certainly be tempted to bump your processing percentage slightly higher! Thanks for breaking down your process, it’s a very fascinating read. It’s so very interesting to me that your knowledge of the subject matter allows you to understand the images in ways that I haven’t even really considered, and yet the core processing techniques that result are relatively familiar to me. I have a lot to learn, I think, so thank you again for putting up with the odd question here and there!

[mcaplinger]

One question I do have - in VFX we often shoot a checkerboard/grid pattern in order to test/view the distortion that is present in a given lens. I was wondering if any such images were taken for Junocam/if that’s a common part of your process, too?

For a fast, wide-angle, fixed-focus lens you need an impractically large grid target to fill the field. For more recent cameras we use the OpenCV calibration software, which uses multiple images of smaller dot targets at different locations in the field. For Junocam we used a mixture of optical prescription data and dot targets, but it hasn't been completely satisfactory, and the cruise star imaging hasn't provided us with the data I'd hoped it would for reasons we still don't completely understand.