Lest you think the Tour has been hibernating through a lackadaisical summer before Series 13, and the inevitable end of the Whittaker era begins, the Tour Honchos have been drilling away at getting the back end of the Tour cleaned up before things start getting busy.
But part of getting at least some of the backlog of work we have set for ourselves cleared before our self-imposed deadline has led us into a very peculiar image-related cul-de-sac. As should be obvious, nobody loves an image gallery more than the Tour does, and we try to make ours with the best quality images we can, so when we see image galleries with, more or less, the imperator of the BBC themselves, in a relatively shoddy condition, we are more than a bit surprised.
The Tour is currently working our way through blu-rays of Season 8, which has issues of its own in terms of overall video quality, which is another whole story, but having just finished Season 14, the issue is the same, the image galleries associated with each story are a real mixed bag. Sure, the images are properly scaled as befits an HD format, but the color photos are all-too-often muddy and washed out. Here’s an example (above) from Colony in Space …
This is a fairly well-known shot from Colony carefully extracted, and here is what will eventually go into the Tour after some color correction and other secret Tour processing …
Our point, a highly esoteric point we acknowledge, is why this much work is needed to make these images presentable in the first place. We don’t mind doing the work, and it’s certainly not a fault of any capturing done by the Tour, but wouldn’t it be in the interest of these not-inexpensive discs to present these in best quality and lavish as much attention there as elsewhere on the disc?
