DeBinky Wells Road Site

This past weekend Yeongmi and I went on a field trip with URARA down in Moab.  We only caught the first day, but what sights we saw!  My favorite was the very last site of the day, off DeBinky Wells Road, north of Dead Horse Point and the Island in the Sky section of Canyonlands.  Dennis DeVore led us to the site and it was amazing.  Since this site is not well known and unvandalized, I am not posting any specific location information and the photos posted have no GPS information attached.

Most of the Panel in DStretch using the LDS filter

'Winged Monster' Rock Art Finally Deciphered

I woke up to this news at Real Clear Science today. This is pretty cool.

'Winged Monster' Rock Art Finally Deciphered

Black Dragon Canyon is one of my favorite rock art sites. It's named after a winged figure that early rock art aficionados thought they saw and then outlined with chalk.

"I myself visited the site in person a few years ago," said Phil Senter, an associate professor of biology at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina, who was not associated with the study. "There's no pterodactyl there at all. It's a collection of other images."

This has been known for quite a while, but the images they were able to tease out of DStretch (see earlier post here) are stunning.

from the article

Rock Art Tour of the Swell

DStretch enhanced photo from Buckhorn Draw August 2014

I took a quick rock art tour of the San Rafael Swell last Saturday with a couple of friends.  We didn't hit any new sites, but revisited Rochester Creek, Moore Cutoff, Short Canyon, Black Dragon Canyon and Buckhorn Draw.

Using DStretch

Rock art is sometimes very faint and difficult to see.  Digital manipulation of a photograph can make the shapes easier to see and recognize.  While Photoshop and other software have the tools to do this, it often requires a pretty detailed knowledge of both the software package and digital imaging in general to get the effects you need.

This is where DStretch comes in.  It's a freely available plugin for ImageJ, an image editor that is also free.  Dstretch has numerous canned filters that emphasize different aspects of an image.  One or more of these is bound to make your vague image much more easy to see.  And they areapplied with the click of a button.  There is even an option to automatically rotate through the filters.  This saves a lot of time and effort, especially if you are dealing with many images.