On Friday, July 26, the TIGHAR Board of Directors met with Jeff Glickman to discuss how we want to proceed with analysis of the recently-acquired 1938 aerial photos. As you know, we have made hi-res jpegs of the images available to any TIGHAResearcher via Flickr. Quite a number of people have requested and received access to the TIGHAR Flickr account.
The hi-res jpegs are a way to make the imagery widely available in keeping with the RNZAF restriction that they be used only for TIGHAR research. As Jeff explained to us, the problem with jpeg images is that the process of converting them from the original format to jpeg greatly reduces the amount of information in the image and introduces distortions and "artifacts" that aren't really there. In other words, to present the images in a format everyone can read we have to significantly degrade their quality. No way around it.
Accordingly, the TIGHAR Board has tasked me with recruiting a "Study Group" of TIGHAResearcher volunteers from EPAC and the TIGHAR Forum who have the hardware and software necessary to work with the 16bit TIFF files that preserve the quality of the images we brought back from New Zealand. The objective of the Study Group will be to call my attention to features and objects of interest that may warrant Jeff's closer inspection and processing with special techniques. Jeff will provide me with the specs for what volunteers will need to have to participate in the Study Group and some guidelines that will help Study Group members avoid some pitfalls in processing the images (for example, using the Brightness and Contrast tool in Photoshop automatically degrades the image from 16bit to 8bit - not good).
As soon as I have the specs from Jeff I'll publish them here so that prospective Study Group participants can see if they have what's needed to help do a detailed examination of the photos. We'll set up the Study Group as a separate email list.