While we're all waiting for the culmination of the MER Mission with Oppy's final arrival at Victoria Crater,
I'm starting a new image series (in addition to my "Alien Landscapes").
It's simply called "Roving Mars" and shows selected scenes from various stages of the Mission as
"pilot-view" impressions viewed through the Rover's Hazcams.
The scenes are colorized based on calibrated multifilter-pancam data of similar scenes, however I usually apply some "artistic" additional color stretching and re-balancing as well as geometric lens corrections in order to increase contrast and visual appeal when creating the "overal mood" of the image

The first one is from Sol 510 and is a hommage to Oppy's ongoing brave fight against the odds of an alien world and is titled "Escape From Purgatory"



enjoy

Very nice ~ here is an old image I worked on during the 'Purgatory' days.



Amazing how deep that trench is...

Nirgal -- very provocative! This would make a cool poster. I love your typography.

Nirgal, what can we say? You are an Artist Extraordinaire!

Thanks for the compliment ... but I hope no real artists are reading this



P.S: I slightly de-saturated the colors of the original image above for a more realistic appearance

Click to view attachment

I took the same frame and rectilinearized it. (switch from fisheye to ordinary lens.)

I usually do that when i want to look at the hazcams. it makes them look more like the other material.

It also makes Anaglyphs look much better.

Click to view attachment

Cool Anaglyph, Malmer !



yes, but unfortunately that correction tends to heavily blurr the image at the sides so I usually only apply a
moderate fish-eye distortion correction as a compromise between too much blurring and realistic geometry.
As a side effect, the remaining fish-eye effect makes the out-of-the-cockpit-perspective look a bit more dramatic

Yes it gets a bit blurry at the edges but I very much like to have the horizon straight. (personal preference)

Its also quite easy to create quicktime VR out of the hazcams for a fast almost 360 panorama.

Malmer, you really gave me the idea to play a bit more with the fisheye correction ...
Fortunately the lens correction can be easily applied *after* the colorization:



Now I for myself am no longer sure which one I like more:
straigt (but edge-blurry) horizon or (moderate) fish-eye effect

... what do the other forum members think ?

I prefer the 'fish eye' look simply because to me, that is how the rovers see things - odd - but there you have it.

Doug

Nirgal : your colorisation are always so good. I liiiiike it

To answer to your question, I prefer the fish eye projection, who is more natural and human-eye like. If we stretch the picture to obtain a rectilinear projection (is this the name?), the corners of the image are too stretch and the features are not as in the reality (have you ever seen ellipsoïdal wheel on the roever ).
I'm for to conserve the fishe eye view of the hazcams .

Both are very nice and great color,
but I prefer the fisheye as more natural looking.

The rectilinear projection gives me the feeling of being inside a shallow crater on the right hand side and therefore a somewhat distorted (looney) view of reality.

Also the left front wheel is too fuzzy and appears to be lying flat on the ground.

still I think it was a valuable experiment to try

ken

Nirgal,
You've created a fantastic series. I hope we'll see lots more.
We need a UMSF book Doug! Yes, I know there's been a thread on that.
Volunteers? Any publishers out there?!

Nirgal's look back at earlier Hazcams got me thinking
Here's a quick animated gif (430k) showing the Front Hazcam view on September 3rd for 2004, 2005 and 2006. We really have come a long way on this journey!
Click to view attachment

Enjoy
Astro0

Hi all,

after a long pause during which I was unfortunately not able to follow the forum as closely as I wished to, due to time constrains :-(
I would like to take the opportunity to revive this old thread and continue the series with a new colorized hazcams poster
"looking back on sol 57" when our newborn robot explorer was just leaving her nest ... not knowing what wonders were waiting for her
during the next 1600 Sols to come

There are also fresh links to the former images of the series (as those were not longer hosted under the old addresses)

Let me just say how much I missed the forum (You guys have kept an awsome great level of quality work during all the time)
and how much I'm looking forward to the coming Great Itha^H Endeavour-Trek thats awaiting us !

:-)

Nirgal: It's great to see you and your exceptional work returning to the forum.

Great to have you back onboard my friend!
...And I want to see some of those works of art of yours from the Long March!

Hey! Welcome back, Nirgal! Been waaaaaaaaaay too long since we saw your works of art here! Can't wait to see what you create out of images taken on the long road ahead...

Thanks a lot for the nice words

Here is an attempt at a color version of the sol1666 rhaz image (Thanks to Paolo for providing the original enhanced b/w image which I suppose is derived from the 12 bit raw data, thus providing better low-light details than the official jpg-version )



(and as always, the usual color accuracy disclaimer applies

Visual poetry!