The "after" pictures are in a different tint or colour scheme which means they are biased (or rather, you are biased by the colours like the missing green). Bad comparison.
The clearer contrast is in the built-up areas in "before" photos that are wiped clean of man-made structures "after". It's hard to imagine how anyone in or near those survived.
I wasn't paying nearly as much attention to the colors, myself...
Why are the images tinted though? They did the same interface for some flooding that happened in Australia, and the 'after' images were also tinted similarly.
They aren’t tinted. It’s all about white balance and levels.
My guess is that satellite images are usually heavily edited to give them a natural appearance (and also to make them consistent with other satellite images) but right after a disaster that editing step is probably skipped due to time constraints. I would imagine that the post-disaster images are much closer to the raw satellite output. I turned on grayscale on my Mac – that helps a bit in that it eliminates the color differences but contrast and levels still do not match.
The destruction is still very obvious. Pay, or example, close attention to bridges, buildings and trees.
I could be spatially challenged enough to not really see it, as the imagery is lacking perspective, but these pictures aren't much after seeing the video footage of the waves rolling in. That was a much starker (re-)realization of their power, similar to 2004.
Perhaps images from a helicopter or high ground would be more evocative.
This interface is so good it's freaky. It's too good. It makes me feel almost responsible for the power of that wave — even as every rational cell in my body begs me that this is not so.
