How the Webb Telescope's Images Are Processed

In one of the dumber controversies on the internet, people are arguing that the colour in the images are fake. 

Duh. Well of course they are, in the sense that the Webb telescope is imaging colours that the human eye can't see, namely the infrared portion of the spectrum. So the colours in the images that have been released are assigned by the scientists and technicians who process the images to bring out the most detail and show the features in their best light (sorry). 

This article does a good job of explaining what the telescope actually sees and how the images are processed. 

“I think there’s some connotations that go along with ‘colorizing’ or ‘false color’ that imply there’s some process going on where we’re arbitrarily choosing colors to create a color image,” DePasquale said. “Representative color is the most preferred term for the kind of work that we do, because I think it encompasses the work that we do of translating light to create a true color image, but in a wavelength range that our eyes are not sensitive to.”

Longer infrared waves are assigned redder colors, and the shortest infrared wavelengths are assigned bluer colors. (Blue and violet light has the shortest wavelengths within the visible spectrum, while red has the longest.) The process is called chromatic ordering, and the spectrum is split into as many colors as the team needs to capture the full spectrum of light depicted in the image.

“We have filters on the instruments that collect certain wavelengths of light, which we then apply a color that is most closely what we think it will be on the [visible] spectrum,” said Alyssa Pagan, a science visuals developer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, in a phone call with Gizmodo.