I have to say I find it amazing how much better the GOUT can be made to look simply by playing with the Hue, Saturation, Brightness and Contrast settings as I have done in VLC this evening. Thanks for the idea Zombie84! :D

I do want to go on the record now and say this though up front, the V3's will not have any of this done, they are what they are, I am just talking about doing this on a separate project and use the lossless avi as the source, but this would be nice to do as a team.

Zombie84 see what you did, you've got Dark_Jedi planning a GOUT V4! LOL

Joking. ;)

Yeah, the images I posted weren't supposed to be definitive or anything, they are just a rough example to give you an approximate effect and get a sense of the palette and details. It's more to demonstrate that just by using automated player settings you can recover the colours to their original form. The biggest problem though will be noise, because when you start boosting colours like this, even if you don't go as far as I took them, you still get noise in some scenes, or even just in specific shots.

ChainsawAsh said:

One of these days (possibly with DJ's V3, actually) I'm seriously considering loading each film into Avid or FCP's Color and color correcting them shot by shot, maybe even doing some scratch & dirt cleanup while I'm at it. 

 Yeah, but at the same time one reason I feel doing a sort of "one light" printing like I have done is good is because it gets rid of the guesswork. Part of the problem I feel is that people tend to colour films they way they would like them to look, or feel they ought to look, instead of the way they should actually be, because sometimes shots need to have some objectionable elements in them in order to be "correct" but people make the mistake of assuming they were ideal looking, or looked more like a particular version we are familiar with. Because the problem with the GOUT is not really a shot-by-shot thing, its an overall problem caused by a print-wide desaturation and a print-wide red shift. So you basically have to work backwards from that, but it would be a set variable condition and not a shot-to-shot thing, so it's really a matter of finding that golden setting that is the perfect opposite of the desaturation and red shift levels. I can see treating the odd shot for video defects, because some shots might need less saturation due to video noise. Adywan is a good example where he really put a lot of work into tweaking each shot to "fix" it using a number of different colour balance controls depending on the shot--but while the completed shot look great, it didn't quite look like it did theatrically. For instance I think I remember he had to do this for one of the shots in Luke's Hoth recovery ("scruffy looking nerfherder" scene) in order to get it white, but if you look at the shot I posted of it, it has a lot of beige in it, with some red and green mixed lighting in the frame. A lot of shots are like that. In the raw GOUT they just look neutral though, once you get the colours back you see how much variation there is in the frame.

Every shot in the GOUT has been affected in the same manner and in the same way as far as any of us can tell (the exception being the binary sunset scene, which was recoloured), so for the most part the same correction setting should be used for the whole film. That would be my take on it. Maybe this wouldn't work as well in practice.

zombie: Thanks very much for posting all those screen shots; wow, what a difference it makes, it's like the theatrical colors are back like they should be (other than the skin being too red). :) Sure, it's not perfect, but it's so much closer than it was before any correction. :) Great work on finding this out. Maybe just ease up on the saturation a bit, and correct the skin tones as best as possible.

hairy_hen's idea sounds really good. Carefully manipulate the color saturation, hue, sharpness and so on in the GOUT DVD set, on a scene by scene basis when needed, using all available sources for comparison (the 1997 SE, photos, etc.), until the most ideal theatrically-accurate combination of color saturation, image detail and skin tone can be achieved. This will give very accurate image colors in the GOUT to work with when doing a restoration of the unaltered trilogy. :) If we can just get the skin tones more accurate, less red, while maintaining as much of the proper color saturation as possible, and while minimizing noise, it appears to already be closer to correct than we might have guessed could have been uncovered so quickly. :)

One can then also take those saturation and other values and apply them to the 2004 DVD set to get most accurate picture color possible in that set, if one wanted to use the 2004 DVD set as a source for scenes that do not have SE changes in them.

dark_jedi: Those screen shots look really nice. :) I can just imagine how great an unaltered Star Wars trilogy DVD set with your overall picture quality and with these color corrections from this thread (but more refined, perfected, better skin tones and so on) applied to the video will look. :)

The GOUT softness will still be there.  I don't know if that is a deal breaker, though.  

Here is a little something I have just been messing with, the V3 is the bottom video, the top, well you can see, been playin wit colors.

http://hotfile.com/dl/95139016/7a343a6/Comparison.rar.html

I have to admit, after messing with the colors like this it really shows how dul this really is, it really does look like it could use some color boost.

Another thought, wouldn't Luke have somewhat of a tan anyways living in the desert, and it would seem Han would to, but not Leia.

Wow. Looks great! Nowhere near as dull and it sure adds some much needed 'pop'.

I gave my latest encode of g-force's latest script a little color boost, I think his earlier ones had it, I don't know why he decided to remove it, as I think it improves the image.

the values on g-force latest script is:

########## black level/gamma, hue
Levels(10,1.08,255,0,255).Tweak(hue=-3)

and this is what I used:

########## black level/gamma, hue
Levels(10,1.08,255,0,255).Tweak(hue=-4,sat=1.3)

a quite subtle approach as I think the GOUT video cannot handle too much saturation before it starts to bleed, try it out, d_j and see if you like it. I will take a look at yours and see how it compares.

Unfortunately, there isn't that much you can do with the internal tweak function, positive values adjust the hue towards red and negative towards green, that's it.

msycamore said:

I gave my latest encode of g-force's latest script a little color boost, I think his earlier ones had it, I don't know why he decided to remove it, as I think it improves the image.

the values on g-force latest script is:

########## black level/gamma, hue
Levels(10,1.08,255,0,255).Tweak(hue=-3)

and this is what I used:

########## black level/gamma, hue
Levels(10,1.08,255,0,255).Tweak(hue=-4,sat=1.3)

a quite subtle approach as I think the GOUT video cannot handle too much saturation before it starts to bleed, try it out, d_j and see if you like it. I will take a look at yours and see how it compares.

Unfortunately, there isn't that much you can do with the internal tweak function, positive values adjust the hue towards red and negative towards green, that's it.

That actually doesn't look to bad either, damn now I am wondering after seeing all this if I should re do the video 1 more time just to bring out some color, maybe if we come up with something that will work I will post in my thread and see what everyone wants, because after all this tweaking, the V3 video the way it is now, is pretty dull.

But that being said, I don't want to tweak just to tweak, like zombie said, we should try to get it as close to theatrical, and not adjust just because "we" think it is right, does that make sense?

dark_jedi said:

msycamore said:

I gave my latest encode of g-force's latest script a little color boost, I think his earlier ones had it, I don't know why he decided to remove it, as I think it improves the image.

the values on g-force latest script is:

########## black level/gamma, hue
Levels(10,1.08,255,0,255).Tweak(hue=-3)

and this is what I used:

########## black level/gamma, hue
Levels(10,1.08,255,0,255).Tweak(hue=-4,sat=1.3)

a quite subtle approach as I think the GOUT video cannot handle too much saturation before it starts to bleed, try it out, d_j and see if you like it. I will take a look at yours and see how it compares.

Unfortunately, there isn't that much you can do with the internal tweak function, positive values adjust the hue towards red and negative towards green, that's it.

That actually doesn't look to bad either, damn now I am wondering after seeing all this if I should re do the video 1 more time just to bring out some color, maybe if we come up with something that will work I will post in my thread and see what everyone wants, because after all this tweaking, the V3 video the way it is now, is pretty dull.

But that being said, I don't want to tweak just to tweak, like zombie said, we should try to get it as close to theatrical, and not adjust just because "we" think it is right, does that make sense?

Funny to get more excited about this than the official BDs but that just happened.

The Aluminum Falcon said:

pittrek said:

It's not funny, it's sad :)

That's so true...and sad...

Just like Han Solo I like to keep a bit of optimism. If G-Force and Dark Jedi can make the GOUT look as good as the screen caps Dark Jedi posted plus the possible addition of Zombie84s suggestions on colour correction, imagine what could be done with the Blu-Ray release!

GL thought he could have his cake and eat it too with the GOUT, I think those I mentioned about have robbed him of that! :D

none said:

Are there photos maybe a publicity still or technical magazine article pic which can act as the goal for one or two of these shots?  I find myself wanting a reference so these before and afters gain some grounding.

 

 Well the easiest way is that I tried to match screencaps to many of the Technicolour photograph shots. Aside from exposure problems which tend to wash out the colours a bit in some of the photographs, you can see that the colours are very close, identical in some instances.

dark_jedi said:

Here is a little something I have just been messing with, the V3 is the bottom video, the top, well you can see, been playin wit colors.

http://hotfile.com/dl/95139016/7a343a6/Comparison.rar.html

I have to admit, after messing with the colors like this it really shows how dul this really is, it really does look like it could use some color boost.

Another thought, wouldn't Luke have somewhat of a tan anyways living in the desert, and it would seem Han would to, but not Leia.

I like what you've done here...but its just  a little much...perhaps what msycamore suggested would be just right?  After seeing this thread and your comparison though DJ I do agree with everyone else that a slight subtle color enhancement would do the GOUT DJ V3 a world of good...

Too much?!? I thought DJ showed purposeful restraint.