I disagree with this. Any picture I've posted are "enhanced" by longer exposures and very sensitive CCDs, but the color you see is color that's there,
Incorrect. May not be entirely false, since you may not have seen many pictures at all, but most likely you don't know how the picture was done.
Just about all the pictures will be made with a monocrhome CCD since that has the highest quantum efficiency, theefore each photon still counts. Then it is prefaced with a filter for quite often non-visible-wavelenths, which cut out lots of photons, but each one that gets through counts more than if it were a permanent doped CCD pixel. The filter is then swapped for other filters and more images taken. And the group is combined and each filter is settled into a colour figure to make it visible for printing. After all, an invisible photon needs to be represented visibly for humans or it isn't sensible to include it on an image, right?
Almost all the images, unless taken by amateur astrophotographers with a colour CCD imager or emulsion (many of which were specially formulated to be sensitive to IR light, invisible as light, but recorded as a dimmed halide crystal and turned into a visible black and white image despite being just as black as empty sky to human sight), will be created by this method, and how to match each image to a colour for amalgamation is part of what the OP was talking about, they did not have the terms, only a recollection.
Yes, NASA sometimes uses fake colors in presentations to point out geological features of some planets
Nope, they usually do it, and almost never for "geological features". Some of it just isn't registered in the visible wavelengths. Most of the interesting stuff isn't.
but that's not what we are talking about when we say "realistic".
It should be, otherwise the GPP is 100% correct. Most of the imaging would be invisible to human eyes, so even if you headcanon that into human augmented sight for the pilots federation, it is still an unrealistic view of the universe since the augmentation would have included some jovian pronouncement of how non-visible wavelengths would be transformed to one or another colour receptor in the eye of a trichromatic or more human.
What the OP and I and others strongly dislike is when ED looks like we're viewing the night sky through colored glasses, kinda like my avatar
So you don't like the change. X4 has a different lighting. Some think it cartoonish. Some thought that ED was ridiculously overexposed.
What you are talking about now is not a lighting issue but a visual preference.
But if that is the case, you should not be using what is realistic, only what is preferred.
So if someone rebuts a post calling unrealistic lighting with the GPP's argument, that riposte is 100% valid, whether or not you yourself call it a personal preference you would like to have control over in your graphics settings, same as AA or shadow detail, et al.
"ED's galaxy looks the most "realistic"
Nope. It does not. the GPP's point was that it was not realistic, then you complained that talking about realism didn't mean that, it was what made sense, a preference, then in the same post proclaimed realism was the point, either rebutting your claim above or making your preference an absolute standard of reality. It isn't.
ED was entirely and utterly unrealistic for a hominid in a spaceship. This version is just as "unrealistic" but it takes, as far as I can tell, the unrealism that it had before and allows the consequences of an alternate reality where such a visual look would be made mechanically possible. And the consequence of it is that there would be a huge amount of tinting from all light sources bright enough to be seen as bright as they appear in the original ED design you called realistic.
Human eyes made sensitive enough to colour to register the nebulae as they did would ALSO tint the cockpit massively, just as the current system does.
No problem if you claim you don't like it.
Just don't call it less realistic than the original view. Because the original view was unrealistic but then abandoned any realistic consequence of its decision, abandoning any reason for it to be "realistic" in an alternate universe and making it unrealistic even where it would appear like that.
