What kind of color correction is used on images taken with a digital camera?
The images in our database represent an agglomeration of sources–some of which have included color correction and some have not. For example, some space station expeditions (ISS-4 and ISS-5) photographed a color card on orbit and this was used to develop a color correction algorithm that could be applied to the images on the ground. All of the above processes are somewhat outside the control of the Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory and apply equally to photographs of Earth and photographs of other subjects. We do hand color correction only for a very few images that are posted with captions to collections such as Earth Observatory or Earth from Space. To get publication-quality results you will probably need to adjust the color balance and contrast for most images downloaded from our site. For scientists that are interested in the spectral content of the image, we recommend requesting that we provide you with a file that has been extracted from the archive file and has not
