A quick guide to getting good colour from old Earth photos

I notice that people often post old Apollo era shots of Earth, unprocessed, in some cases reproduced from faded prints.

Well, haze in the atmosphere dulls down all shots from space, but it’s REALLY easy to fix. I’ll be using Photoshop elements, but you can do the same with pretty much any image editor, including the free open source GIMP. Similar options are available on tablets and phones.

The same techniques are a good start in restoring scans of old family photos.

 Here’s the original image.

An unprocessed Apollo photo of Earth. Note how faded the colours look.

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Earths of Distant Suns by Michael Carroll

eods1There’s a new book out by Michael Carroll, covering possible earthlike worlds around other stars, and how we might reach them.

And several of my images are in there, in the advanced propulsion sections! I’ve not got very far into it yet, but so far it’s impressive, and the artwork is very nicely printed.

It’s here on amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Earths-Distant-Suns-Communicate-Travel/dp/3319439634

And here on Amazon USA: https://www.amazon.com/Earths-Distant-Suns-Communicate-Travel/dp/3319439634

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Soyuz Capsule Mesh

No updates for a while, but there are some new one to go in!

I recently bought a Russian Soyuz capsule mesh on TurboSquid. The textures didn’t really come in at all, (not unusual in my experience), but it was fairly straightforward to apply new ones, as surfaces were sensibly named. I was also really pleased to see that the orange seams were done with geometry!

Here are a couple of new renders, where I composited the mesh over Earth, using NASA photos taken from the ISS.

As usual, all of this is done in Lightwave 3D.soyuz-ascendingx

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Mercury capsule, texturing and clean-up

I’m currently sorting out surfaces for this Mercury capsule. But even so I thought it was good enough for a first shot at a finished render…

For those who don’t know, (is there anyone?) the Mercury program was the USA’s first manned spaceflight project, with a capsule capable of holding a single astronaut. The first few launches were sub-orbital. Astronaut control was limited, leading to Chuck Yaeger’s famous remark that the pilots were more like “spam in a can”.

It was a difficult time, as the US struggled to catch up with the early lead set by the Soviet Union.

And here are some more basic renders too.

Mercury Capsule
Mercury Capsule

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