One of the instruments on the Juno mission to Jupiter is the Junocam - the camera that is photographing Jupiter. The images are in the public domain and the Junocam website features a Processing gallery where the “raw” images are available. In addition, folks can upload to the site their own processed versions of the images.
Here is a shot of an image for people to experiment with.
A slightly psychadelic take, bringing out excessive details and colors, in Rawtherapee. Color and detailizing effects achieved with white balance, contrast, LAB color effects, HSL, and wavelets. I also used the defringe tool, as the registration between color channels didn’t seem to be quite on point.
Junocam’s camera is of the push-frame variety. That means that rather than taking a single photo of a scene, it actually creates a single photo by combining multiple strips of “exposures” or scans. So if you want to truly process the “raw” images you’d also need to deal with the geometry of combining the individual strips into their single image. Personally I’m happy to skip that part and focus on processing the final composite image - which itself is pretty challenging.
I should point out that Junocam’s images all have a brownish-yellow color cast to them. For me, eliminating that while boosting the other colors has been a real challenge. I did write about processing Junocam images back at the start of the year: Image Processing and the Juno JunoCam which you may find useful if you want more background on the subject.
All kinds of things in RawTherapee 5.4-dev: Dehaze, Soft Light, Gradient, RGB levels, color channels. Nothing by way of sharpening or wavelet enhancement.
I was not particularly preoccupied with the colour or details this time. Just wanted to provide a nice presentation of Jupiter. I typically use image stats to process the photo; however, the black and fringe presented a unique challenge. I had to go back and forth between the mask and the original and masked images. Likely much easier with a GUI, oh well…
1.gmic → generate mask A → mask out black, fringes B → extract region C → gather stats C → adjust brightness, contrast (curves) B → crush blacks, soften edges A B → rotate → crop → frame → sharpen (LoG) → resize
