https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Manipulating_Satellite_Photos_Now_R...
It was also just the COOLEST THING EVER to swap infrared bands in LANDSAT ETM+ imagery and watch vegetation immediately pop out at you. It's what turned this sort of dull (at least for a teenager) geoscience into a kind of puzzle where you have to figure out how to bring the signal up out of the data.
(Also fun to play with a polarizing filter.)
Pretty funny to figure out that your perspective wasn't objective reality and then immediately decide to canonicalize another arbitrary reality as the One True Reality.
1) Colors > Components > Decompose > LAB
2) For the layers of the A/B (chroma) channels, Colors > Levels > "Auto Input Levels" (maximize the contrast), and move the mid point to the median.
3) Colors > Components > Compose > LAB
The result I got for the original mars image was a washed out red image with some yellow around the craters.
I got this as a result https://i.imgur.com/RsXx3y2.jpeg and it certainly doesn't preserve the color of the rest of the image (there are probably more algorithmic steps needed for that) but it does seem to make highlight the same faint patterns much more clearly.
The center point controls the gamma correction, so you can map a biased distribution (mostly bright or dark for example) to be more evenly distributed.
That was the purpose of that step - move the midpoint slider to about where the peak in the histogram is, to get an evenly distributed range.
The low/high slider can be moved towards that to increase the contrast.
"Contrast" here will only apply to the A/B channels, which is the color information, so it's increasing the color contrast and unbiasing it, while keeping the luminance information.
Photoshop also can do the same transform, and interactively in the LAB colorspace (no need to combine/uncombine the channels first).
This is what I was after: "move the midpoint slider to about where the peak in the histogram is, to get an evenly distributed range."
It kinda worked! Thank you and sorry for making you explain the gory details though they are appreciated and useful.
I was super excited about DCS based on some of the recovered petroglyph photos online, and integrated it into some software I wrote years ago.[1] Still hoping I find something as interesting with it as the fellow mentioned in the article. It works, but I haven't had a "gosh, I never would have seen that without DCS!" moment.
[1] https://www.beneaththewaves.net/Photography/Decorrelation_St... / https://www.beneaththewaves.net/Software/The_Mirrors_Surface...
Well, it's obvious they really wanted to though. This isn't like marking on a wall with a Sharpie. They had to work at it to make it happen. The commitment alone is impressive even if it was just a "Grogg was here!"
> "No matter what you do, when we find something weird in ancient history we will decide it must've been part of a fertility rite."
In reality very interesting work and results, but a little disturbing that it took three or four decades and a self-funded citizen scientist to transfer the knowledge to the application.
This paper might also be of interest - https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/13/20/3297
"In this paper, we review the theory behind decorrelation stretch and propose some alternative algorithms that resolve the issues of the standard approach."
"The DStretch [mobile] app is a lightweight version of DStretch intended to give users the ability to enhance rock art in the field. It is not a substitute for the DStretch plugin which has much more functionality."
