Raster Catalog

[JoshWhite]

This is actually a pre-Beta issue but I haven't received any response in the regular forums.  I have my aerials tiled by Section (in PLSS system) and in TIF format.  I tried to put them into a Raster Catalog to be able to better manipulate them and I find that they are washed out.  I actually removed them from the geodatabase partly because I am not using SDE and have to copy the data manually to a backup location and it takes too long to copy the imagery every time.  Does a Raster Catalog compress the images?  I used the image correction but that is just one extra step to have to deal with and has to be set up in every mxd and I didn't try it but probably doesn't work at all in a web map.

[RonaldBerger]

Thank you for your testing effort.
Can you specify what you are trying to do and the exact behavior you are seeing (screenshots)? If you use a managed raster catalog, then yes, your data will be loaded into the raster catalog GDB which by default uses a lossless compression. For testing purposes I would try an unmanaged raster catalog which only references your original data that is on disk. This way you can see if the "wash out" display is caused by loading your data into a GDB or not.
Can you provide more information specifically what you want to accomplish with the raster catalog. You mention 'manipulating' it, but the catalog is not designed to manipulate a lot of imagery at once.
Since you are testing 9.4 beta, you can also try to use a mosaic dataset to see if you have similar issues.
Let me know if this helps.

[JoshWhite]

Honestly, the main the thing I was doing was discovering how useful a Raster Catalog is for me.  Apparently, it is not useful to me.  The lossless"ness" is very unattractive, I might as well use black and white.  For now I will just use them in their native format and have a lyr file set up to easily add them to a new mxd.  I will have to try the Beta mosaic feature though and let you know what I discover.