Announcing the one, the only, the singular

Yes, that's right, I've finally found the official answer, and all
us graphics geeks can just pack up and go home.

How it came about was that I was comparing a Spirit color image I'd created of the "scuff" on Serpent Dune to NASA's version. NASA's version was pretty much a single color, yet the press release caption called it "true color". So I asked myself, "Self, where the heck did all the colors go?". You know me, I had to set out to find out where all the colors had run off to. First step, of course, was to analyse NASA's "Serpent Scuff":

(The spectra in these images isn't intended to correspond to the histogram; the spectra is just a gradient of the measured hue values.)

Huh...notice anything different (he asked rhetorically)? Hmmm...there's pretty much just one color in this "true color" image.

I want to be very clear about something: This isn't about whether the colors in my images are right or wrong; it isn't about levels of saturation, or any of the arcane stuff we've debated. It's about why the NASA "true color" image has (effectively) only one color; or to be picky, such an extremely narrow range of hue that the slight variation is likely just due to noise.

So I zipped to the opposite side of the planet to see if Mars was the same color over at Oppy's place:

Yup. I'll skip over the other MER images I checked. Pretty much the same thing, with a few exceptions like the blueberry images (it would've been pretty confusing, I guess, to call it an image of "blueberries" if they were all the same orange hue).

I decided to travel back in time to the thrilling days of Pathfinder:

While I'll be durned...

The journey to 1997 was worth it, because I quickly found the source of this fascinating phenomenon:

There ya go. This Maki fella wrote a paper about processing IMP images,
and from that The Powers That Be decided that Mars was all one color, and this is it. I particularly like that part about how "a calibrated output device is required [to] accurately reproduce the correct colors". You betcha.

I feel kind of foolish for having invested hundreds of hours going to all the trouble of actually combining images from different filters to make so-called "RGB" images. Turns out all I really need to do to play with the big guys of image processing is just take any old monochrome image and colorize it with The Official True Color of Mars. I can knock out something like that in a matter of minutes, like this image of "Serpent Scuff", bringing us right back to where I started:

(I like my version better, which cracks me up: Even when I cheat, I cheat better than NASA.)

Time to go free up gigabytes of hard drive space and uninstall all that graphic software. Sure wish I'd discovered NASA's little shortcut long before this.

G'night...and will the last image processor to leave please turn out the lights?