PART 3:
With a BW map cleaned out of most issues, the next task was to add detail to areas with spacecraft. Using a MRO mosaic (though not photo corrected) I added detail to areas where spacecraft have been located on Mars including:Mars 3, Viking 1, Viking 2, Pathfinder, Beagle 2, Spirit, Opportunity, Phoenix, Curiosity, Schiaparelli, InSight, Zhurong, and Perseverance. One of the coolest features GIMP has is the color balance tool. The first thing I did was take color from MRO Hirise images of light and dark transition areas, then use the color of the dark area over the whole planet. The next task was to use the color balance tool to redden the lighter areas as Mars dust has a similar color overall globally. The next step was to then color the ice caps separately. The icecaps have a magenta tinge to them from dust. I added this in a duplicate layer using the balance tool then used a layer mask to 75 latitude and up to prevent this from affecting brighter areas of dust in Hellas and Tharsis. For none-ice cap covered areas of the poles, it gives off a slight magenta tinge as if there is frost there.
- coloring dust
- Frost in polar areas
This was not enough. The next step was to give it variation. Because this map was colored by brightness, it was lacking variation. There was however a Viking map with color, the Viking red velvet ant map as I like to call it. It was enhanced color but I can fix that by making it at 12.5 percent strength. With this, it allowed me to add variations to color. And after 200 hours of work, I had this giant beautiful 64K map of Mars in true color as it appeared in the early 2000's and with the most recent pole to pole mosaics I could find. Hopefully one day we can get a photocorrected mosaic from the MRO, Odyssey, or MEX to use. Until then it beats having mosaics dating to the 70's for once by a great margin given Mars has a facelift every two decades. This texture will be released in a beta release of Mars in the next couple weeks.
- Thumbnail of completed work.
