OK, here's another question for those who know much more about compression artifacts and unsharp masking than I do. (I'm not being smart *** here, I really am a babe in the woods when it comes to photo processing). My question is, if there are compression artifacts on a JPG image that has been pushed too far, why on this particular one are they only evident in the lower area, and not in the rest of the image? Like on the mountains. And, if you want, forget the unsharp mask and follow my processing to that point. You will still see the patterns, and as I said before, they appear much more diverse compared to the compression artifacts that I have seen as examples, which appear to be fuzzy squares on the edges of photos. The original image from ESA is over 1.2 Megs, and gives a resolution of 40 meters per pixel resulting, I have roughly figured, in about 4.8 miles per inch of image. I don't find that to be an excessive amount of compression. I would love to have access to the bitmap image or tif image if that was possible. I was ready to accept the fact that they were compression artifacts, until I went back and ran the whole sequence again, and keep coming up with shapes that in my opinion, exceed what is usually thought of as compression artifacts. How about someone sending me an example of a compression artifact that mimics what I have produced? Here's my E address in case you would like to minerjp@comcast.net

Sincerely,

JP