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Description
This my version of the Viking map of Mars that's all over the internet. The imagery was aquired in red and violet filters, not quite suitable for composing true color textures. The red channel had unnatural high contrast and the blue channel had no albedo structures at all. I disregarded the green channel because it was synthesized anyways. I then toned down the contrast of the red channel to fit imagery from the Mangalayan spacecraft and mixed some of the red channel into the violet filter channel to simulate a blue filter, then mixed a green channel from those 2. Finally, I matched the colors according to this site: www.donaldedavis.com/20…
I am surprised how subtle the colors appear when properly calibrated. I knew before that the polar caps are more yellow than white (or pink ...?) but here they look almost green. This is probably due to a lack of color data from the source texture.

Data is from here: astrogeology.usgs.gov/…
This texture is downscaled to 16k, because the source material is not crisp enough to justify a higher resolution. Also it is much more convenient to handle a 16k texture compared to 23k

Description
This my version of the Viking map of Mars that's all over the internet. The imagery was aquired in red and violet filters, not quite suitable for composing true color textures. The red channel had unnatural high contrast and the blue channel had no albedo structures at all. I disregarded the green channel because it was synthesized anyways. I then toned down the contrast of the red channel to fit imagery from the Mangalayan spacecraft and mixed some of the red channel into the violet filter channel to simulate a blue filter, then mixed a green channel from those 2. Finally, I matched the colors according to this site: www.donaldedavis.com/20…
I am surprised how subtle the colors appear when properly calibrated. I knew before that the polar caps are more yellow than white (or pink ...?) but here they look almost green. This is probably due to a lack of color data from the source texture.

Data is from here: astrogeology.usgs.gov/…
This texture is downscaled to 16k, because the source material is not crisp enough to justify a higher resolution. Also it is much more convenient to handle a 16k texture compared to 23k