The Earthrise Image

Our Earthrise image was shot during the famous Apollo 11 mission that was the first to land a man on the moon. To obtain a high quality image to enlarge and reproduce, we contacted NASA's national archives department. Using the photo ID numbers we found on NASA's website, we ordered three images from Houston.

NASA will not supply the general public with images directly, but rather sends duplicates to a local lab where they are scanned to your specifications. The first set of scans we received were not up to our standards and were returned. With the help of NASA's public relations department, we were able to get the second generations negatives pulled and scanned at 6,000 dpi.

Even with these close-to-original slides, there was still a lot of work to be done to reproduce a flawless poster.

First, we carefully masked out the Earth, Space and Moon. To give the Moon a more uniform color, we desaturated the hue to pull out some of the red tone that was prevalent on this particular image. We then over-saturated the background of Space, to give it a solid, thick black.

Next, we zoomed in close on the Moon and retouched every inch of the image to remove any small scratches and dust marks.

While the images we received from the NASA archives were of high quality, thirty years have left their mark. There was a lot of careful work needed to restore the photo to it's original glory.
 
The Earth's ocean was given a slight enhancement to bring out the blue, as if the Earth was photographed from Earth's orbit, and not 240,000 miles away.

The final poster was then printed with direct-to-plate technology. By skipping the film process, a whole generation of quality loss is avoided and the plates provide a much finer resolution. In addition, we used thick, high quality photographic paper and finished the poster with a UV gloss varnish. The end result is a truly stunning poster.