Originally posted by easynow
did you notice the life support system (backpack) on the astronaut is dark from shadow and in the other versions it's bright as day and no shadow
?
Yes, and that's exactly that loss of subtle details that makes me think of a bad digital version or a digital version of a bad physical copy of the
original photo.
i can't say either way because i didn't see the disappearing pics like you did so i don't know what to say on that. what exactly makes you
think it's from those TIFF collection ?
Those images are still available, although not in TIFF format, the best at the time. Unfortunately,
that site (
The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth) is not working this weekend.
You can detect them because those images were digitised from the full plate, so it shows a little more than the normal photo, going a little beyond
the emulsion area, that's why we see that slightly darker area around the photo, just before the image ends.
You can see in this crop from that first photo what is visible and what is not.
(click for full size)
In this crop from that last photo you can see much more detail, the flag on the shoulder of the astronaut was not even visible in the first photo.
(click for full size)
Knowing that's impossible to create detail where it did not existed, it makes me think that the first photo can only be a bad copy of the the third
(or a copy from another version that was at least as good as the third photo).
I also tried to make an image that looked like the first using the third image, by changing the brightness and contrast, and this is the result.
(click for full size)
After doing this I used PaintShopPro's count function, to see how many colours the three versions have.
The crop with more colours (58664 colours) is the one from the first image you posted, making me think that this was after all a scan of a bad
original and not a bad scan of a good original, a bad scan would have less colours. Also, the image in which I changed the brightness and contrast, as
expected, as much less colours, only 7484. Before those adjustments it had 43066 colours.