NASA and Space general conspiracy discussions

I am a very experienced Photoshop user and the above is in my considered view conspiracist nonsense.

Images from space are all processed one way or another (although a vast array of unprocessed images is available too) and the images that make the media are specially processed to make sense and illustrate stuff for the layman. For example, false colours in a nebula, or on Pluto, to emphasize features.

Sadly, there is nothing that can be done by them which will not immediately be converted into a conspiracy theory by someone and they will have no shortage of adherents whose default position is that every single thing is part of some overwhelming conspiracy, from a middle-ground one like yours (that the rover is on Mars, but NASA is "covering up" something to do with life on Mars); to the "Don't Be Sheeple Nobody Nor Nothing Ever Left Earth You Can't Survive The Van Allen Belts Its All In A Hollywood Studio" extremists, to the adherents that we are all in real-life Truman Show.

I much prefer Occam in the typical scenario.

Often people link as you did) to videos by self-appointed "experts" - I tend from weary experience to give those a miss as the large quantity I have seen have invariably turned out to be by people who are deluded and are much easier to spot than your Photoshop examples. But I did dip into the one you posted, and while i have only watched 10% of it's 1 hour-plus, this was more than enough to entirely discredit this guy in my eyes as he has clearly lost sight of simple hard cold facts in pursuit of his own agenda. I stopped watching when he referred to the so-called Monolith on Mars (an interesting feature) and then panned images of many other features that he implied were a proliferation of other monoliths - when it would be obvious to a schoolchild that in fact they were lengthened shadoesw from standard rocks near the terminator at sunset/sunrise. An embarrassing thing to watch a man putting himself forward as an expert analyst of some sort propounding.

Occam might ask, if when the first Rovers landed on Mars, and when NASA clearly found out about "telltale organic processes", are they really so stupid if they wanted to for some (unexplained) reason hide the existence of these processes from mankind, that they would instead launch a series of further craft to the planet, and make freely available over many years millions of images from these craft?

That is my short answer. I am extremely grateful to NASA for their indefatigable efforts to advance our knowledge of the universe, and am in awe of their technical achievements most recently the superb Pluto mission. If however they have the technology to do all that - you think they would spoil the ship for a ha'porth of incompetent buffoons who couldn't fake images properly? And incompetent supervisors/superiors who could't properly check fake work before it is released to the world? Really? Given the importance of such an imagined task, would it be left to Australian backpackers on a gap year? And to cap it all, simultaneously release the raw data too? I don't think so.

People want to know what Mars looks like. That itself is a loaded question. The view from your own front window looks like a million different things and colours depending on the time of year, or the time of day. NASA has always readily agreed that colour reproduction isn't an exact science, and indeed isn't really possible. As a Photoshop expert, you will understand that colour balance is a highly subjective thing.
Secondly, people perceive colours differently, sometimes greatly so. (Remember the is it blue dress anyone? - had that been on Mars, the conspiracy world would have literally exploded!).

This difficulty (impossibility, if you like) is the precise reason why NASA often releases several versions, the raw file, unprocessed colour images and what they suggest would be true-colour versions. But there would be two true-colour versions, the first is what would the view look like in Earth-like lighting conditions, the second, what would it look like through the interference of Mars' atmosphere. Mars is called the red planet because it is. The atmosphere contains red dust. This gives a "false colour" to any image, to a greater or lesser extent, depending how much dust is in the air at your location. So, yes, an image could look very reddish if you were stood next to the rover; and yes, the same view could be much brighter and "earth like" if you filter out the red cast.

However, "manipulating" is very much part of astronomy. For example, no human eye would ever see the Cat's Eye Nebula as the bright, green/red object from many well-known images. Indeed, most of what the Hubble telescope (if you believe in its existence) produces is the result of very long exposures. Indeed the same could be said for the vast majority of astronomical images from any source including my own DSLR. Manipulation is therefore the norm, and one man's manipulation will produce a different looking image than the next. But neither are "fake" - they represent reality, over a longer timeframe. Or reality if you were several light years nearer, and had the eye sensitivity of a barn owl. The point is just to help visualise what is there, and visualize it in different ways (see for example the myriad shots of the Sun taken with hydrgogen alpha and any number of other filters).

I think overall your error is forgetting that the human eye can only se a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and only at high illumination levels. You are taking the 2+2 of standard attempts to image standard views, and making 666.

Now, I think that has dealt with the "Astronomy" aspect of this discussion. I don't really think we need to go down NASA conspiracy roads here as it would again derail it. I would be happy to continue rational discussion in a NASA conspiracy or whatever thread if you want to start one but this is just to draw people's attention to what they can go out and see in the night sky, which does include Mars (if you believe that it exists as a planet and is not a NASA holograph).