er, moe, you can't put 12 pounds of #&*% in an ...

er, moe, you can't put 12 pounds of #&*% in an 8 pound bag.

The RAD images ( Radiometrically Corrected Data ) ( publicly released about 6 months or so after the original exposures )are in a lossless PDS format that preserves the original 12 bits of precision with flat field and other technical corrections.

I use the plugin "PDS Reader" to input read the PDS RAD images into imagej as 16 bit images.

The JPGs are 8 bit precision with reduced quality ( the dreaded JPGies that are so obvious in the RGB-D image of reply 55. ) and a sometimes wicked contrast stretch and / or brightness clip.

I did image compares on several of the duplicates and the images were identical. Some have made their way through Photoshop -- which by the way zapped the exif metadata ( bad program, bad! Go lay down in the corner! Bad, bad, bad. )

I am frankly puzzled by the poor organization of the ASU "raw" images. There was even an image from a Viking mission! I searched in vain for the location of the Viking rocks in the Phoenix panoramas, wondering how I had missed them - and finally realized where the image was!

Weird.