Schlagwort-Archive: gamma

Caveat: Even NASA pictures may not be linear (or the wrong kind of linear)

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Today I am going to share a dis­cov­ery that might not be news­wor­thy for many peo­ple, but for me it seemed some­what scanadalous at first. Could it real­ly be true that an over­sight of this kind slips through the cracks and makes it to the front page of pub­licly released NASA pic­tures? Appar­ent­ly yes. This talk is about miss­ing gam­ma cor­rec­tion in some space images which there­fore give an unre­al­is­tic appear­ance. This issue seems to exist on top of the col­or-fil­ter issue (where the imag­ing instru­ments most­ly do not have spec­tral sen­si­tiv­i­ties that cor­re­spond to human vision) and results in a dis­tor­tion of bright­ness rela­tion­ships between objects. Extra cau­tion is there­fore advised when using these images as a ref­er­ence for artis­tic purposes.

The Lunar Transit picture

Lunar tran­sit as cap­tured by the EPIC cam­era on board of the Deep Space Cli­mate Obser­va­to­ry. Left: image as pub­lished; right: corrected.

I remem­ber how in 2015 an image of a lunar tran­sit tak­en by the Earth Poly­chro­mat­ic Imag­ing Cam­era (EPIC) made rounds in sev­er­al twit­ter threads. These tran­sits hap­pen reg­u­lar­ly, the lat­est one being from feb­ru­ary this year. There’s just one prob­lem with these images as orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished on the NASA web­site: they’re too dark. As if some­body took the files with the lin­ear pho­ton counts from the sci­en­tif­ic instru­ments, and threw them togeth­er to make the images while for­get­ting to account for dis­play gam­ma.

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Correct sRGB Dithering

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This is a brain-dump inspired by a thread on twit­ter about cor­rect™ dither in sRGB, mean­ing, to choose the dither pat­tern in such a way as to pre­serve the phys­i­cal bright­ness of the orig­i­nal pix­els. This is in prin­ci­ple a solved prob­lem, but the dev­il is in the details that are eas­i­ly over­looked, espe­cial­ly when dither­ing to only a few quan­ti­za­tion levels.

So, this top­ic came up on twitter:

I had pre­vi­ous­ly spent some time to wrap my head around this exact prob­lem, so I shot from the hip with some pseu­do code that I used in Space Glid­er on Shader­toy. Code post­ings on twit­ter are nev­er a good idea, so here is a cleaned up ver­sion wrapped up in a prop­er function:

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So, where are the stars?

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In my pre­vi­ous rant about dynam­ic expo­sure in Elite Dan­ger­ous (which hon­est­ly applies to any oth­er space game made to date), I made a rough cal­cu­la­tion to pre­dict the bright­ness of stars as they should real­is­ti­cal­ly appear in pho­tos tak­en in out­er space. My pre­dic­tion was, that,

  • for an illu­mi­na­tion of sim­i­lar strength to that on earth,
  • if the sun­lit parts are prop­er­ly exposed,
  • and with an angu­lar res­o­lu­tion of about 2 arc min­utes per pixel,

then the pix­el-val­ue of a promi­nent star should be in the order of 1 to 3 (out of 255, in 8‑bit sRGB encod­ing). Since then I was curi­ous to find some real world val­i­da­tion for that fact, and it seems I have now found it.

ISS_and_Endeavour_EV+0

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Elite Dangerous: Impressions of Deep Space Rendering

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I am a backer of the upcom­ing Elite Dan­ger­ous game and have par­tic­i­pat­ed in their pre­mi­um beta pro­gramme from the begin­ning, pos­i­tive­ly enjoy­ing what was there at the ear­ly time. ‘Pre­mi­um beta’ sounds like an oxy­moron, pay­ing a pre­mi­um for an unfin­ished game, but it is noth­ing more than pur­chas­ing the same backer sta­tus as that from the Kick­starter cam­paign.

I came into con­tact with the orig­i­nal Elite dur­ing christ­mas in 1985. Com­pared with the progress I made back then in just two days, my recent per­for­mance in ED is lousy; I think my com­bat rat­ing now would be ‘com­pe­tent’.

But this will not be a game­play review, instead I’m going to share thoughts that were inspired while play­ing ED, most­ly about graph­ics and shad­ing, things like dynam­ic range, sur­face mate­ri­als, phase curves, ‘real’ pho­tom­e­try, and so on; so … after I loaded the game and jumped through hyper­space for the first time (actu­al­ly the sec­ond time), I was greet­ed by this screen fill­ing disk of hot plasma:

ED001

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Journey into the Zone (Plates)

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I have exper­i­ment­ed recent­ly with zone plates, which are the 2‑D equiv­a­lent of a chirp. Zone plates make for excel­lent test images to detect defi­cien­cies in image pro­cess­ing algo­rithms or dis­play and cam­era cal­i­bra­tion. They have inter­est­ing prop­er­ties: Each point on a zone plate cor­re­sponds to a unique instan­ta­neous wave vec­tor, and also like a gauss­ian a zone plate is its own Fouri­er trans­form. A quick image search (google, bing) turns up many results, but I found all of them more or less unus­able, so I made my own.

Zone Plates Done Right

I made the fol­low­ing two 256×256 zone plates, which I am releas­ing into the pub­lic so they can be used by any­one freely.

Cosine zone plate with constrast weighting

Cosine zone plateCC0

Zone plates with contrast weighting

Sine zone plateCC0

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Yes, sRGB is like µ‑law encoding

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I vague­ly remem­ber some­one mak­ing a com­ment in a dis­cus­sion about sRGB, that ran along the lines of

So then, is sRGB like µ‑law encoding?

This com­ment was not about the col­or space itself but about the spe­cif­ic pix­el for­mats nowa­days brand­ed as ’sRGB’. In this case, the answer should be yes. And while the tech­ni­cal details are not exact­ly the same, that anal­o­gy with the µ‑law very much nails it.

When you think of sRGB pix­el for­mats as noth­ing but a spe­cial encod­ing, it becomes clear that using such a for­mat does not make you auto­mat­i­cal­ly “very picky of col­or repro­duc­tion”. This assump­tion was used by hard­ware ven­dors to ratio­nal­ize the deci­sion to lim­it the sup­port of sRGB pix­el for­mats to 8‑bit pre­ci­sion, because peo­ple “would nev­er want” to have sRGB sup­port for any­thing less. Not true!Screen Shot 2014-03-06 at 19.02.54I’m going to make a case for this lat­er. But first things first.

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