/3/ - 3DCG

>>676824
So a few things why this comes across as fake:
>it's from an alien planet
It's quite literally nothing we've seen before. Probably causes some dissonance when you're trying to compare it because you immediately go for a frame of reference, but it's a freakin' alien planet. Any frame of reference you manage to find would be far off.
>alien planet pt.2
Physical characteristics are not the same. The rocks on Mars are probably way different from what we have on Earth, as such they likely erode and fracture differently from what we'd expect. That's not to mention what impact an otherworldly atmosphere would have on erosion and what not. Hell, light interacts differently there. With the Sun much further away and going through a much thinner yet dustier atmosphere, lighting's bound to come across as somewhat uncanny.
>post-processing
All of NASA images undergo some amount of post-processing. I doubt it to be in any major transformative manner, but we all know a touch of post-processing can shake things up quite a bit. On the post linked in >>676807 it even says
>The scene is presented with a color adjustment that approximates white balancing to resemble how the rocks and sand would appear under daytime lighting conditions on Earth.
Which just comes across as an odd thing to do (from an artistic point of view). It's like if you took a picture just before dawn, where skylight paints everything this beautiful blue, but you white balance the blue away then wonder why everything looks different. It can get rid of mood and make everything look clinical.
>equipment
While the MastCams are true-color, they are still scientific tools. They're not some DSLR with sophisticated color science. It's probably capturing colors to some degree of inaccuracy. If pic related, an image on Earth taken by a MastCam, is unedited and raw output, I think we can deduct why images taken with them can look a little funny.