Interested in Processing Raw Curiosity Images from the PDS?

If there is anyone who wants to process past sol images from Curiosity, here is one way to go about doing that based on my personal experience. Your first step will be collection of data, retrieving the raw .img file from NASA's Planetary Data System. There are several ways I've found to do this but the easiest way to start, is through the "MSL Notebook," which organizes science data from Curiosity Rover. Clicking the Sol tab in the upper left will take you to the appropriate sol mission data products and the camera images will be among them with a preview window. In the image window is an action tab which will take you to the raw .img data file along with a label file, you'll generally want both. They also have a jpg and png versions.

The raw .img Mastcam & MAHLI-cam files come in different versions (DRCX, DRCL, DRXX & DRLX)*. Once you have the raw .img file and label file of your choice, it will need to be converted into a TIF or PNG image by a spectral conversion program. The one that works for me is the "Multispec" developed at Purdue University. Once acquired, it has a window with which the .img files can be opened. For the mastcam images, you set the color filters (Red-1, Green-2, Blue-3), and I usually select the Min-max Enhancement to "Entire Range" to start. You can set a percentage to clip the tails, to give the image a contrast stretch, but I find the images generally loose details that way. Contrast can be a good tool to provide a little dimension in an otherwise flat image but when over used, can destroy it by obscuring details. If the lights have lost detail, there's generally too much. Anyway, click ok, give the file a directory and make a TIF file that you can correct in a photo program. From my experience, they tend to look a little red because of the mid-range, so they usually need some red removed and a little saturation added. Too much saturation will cause additional color noise so my advice is, like contrast, use it sparingly.

If the "Multispec" does not work for you, there is also IMG2PNG . It works with command prompt commands and you need to make sure your raw file is in the same directory as IMG2PNG. I will post more about processing MSL images here in the near future, but this will get you started. Any questions, post them in this thread and I will respond to them as time permits. Below, some additional resources.

pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html

pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/search/

www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/

www.whatsupinthesky.com/index.php/forum/nasapds/2506-a-good-start-for-beginners-of-the-planetary-database-system#5391

Anybody else want to give it a try?

For those interested, here is a tip on opening PDS images with Photoshop from Emily Lakdawalla.

www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2018/0307-image-processing-trick-raw-photoshop.html

Todd, thanks for the tips. I've been able to use the files from the PDS using the bulk file download and wget. I found the latest release of Irfanview does a very good job converting the .DAT files into jpg, png, tiff, et al. in batch mode. Although it seems that some of the images from the PDS in a given SOL don't line up correctly when assembling mosaics. I've been using Kolor and Image Composite Editor with differing results. Some mosaics come out great with one and not the other. Photoshop also works very good for mosaics with a smaller number of images.

I would be interested in knowing what other's are using to assemble mosaics.

I use Photoshop CC to combine most of my composites, it'll handle 200+ images but that may have something to do with RAM, processor type and bit depth.