Its funny while I know the middle one is overly saturated for some reason its the one I am most aesthetically attracted too. LOL

I tried playing around with Doctor Ms settings he posted above and after a couple of hours of messing around I kinda gave up on that method and went back to the method I was using before. I spent another few hours further tweaking the settings I already had and here are the results:








The Avisynth script for these colour settings would be;

########## Technicolor Imbibition
ColorYUV(off_u=-6,off_v=-2.3).Tweak(sat=1.1).Levels(16,1.08,235,0,255)

Doctor M: Thanks for all your time and effort on the great analysis of the screen shots! :) It's very helpful to understand what the problem is with the colors, so then an optimum correction can be applied to make it look as close to the real theatrical presentation as possible.

Those corrections you made look a lot better, the flesh tones are more natural and the whole image looks for life-like, more the way it should.

Wow, those shots from the Technicolor print look awesome, don't they? :) Thank God we have those a reference.

CrumbY: I also like what you did there, looks good. Hopefully all the experts here can carefully compare the various color correction ideas from the various screen shots (hue, saturation, black levels, contrast, etc.) and come up with a set of corrections that will get the picture as close as possible to the proper theatrical appearance, while still maintaining good flesh tones, avoiding bleeding and noise, etc.

Once a really great set of correction values has been arrived at, then those working on restoration projects, like dark_jedi and his V3 DVD set, can use those values to give their restorations the best most accurate colors possible.

I am not having real good results with Dr. M's adjustments and I am running your exact tweaks, to me it does not look much better than the V3 the way it is, and Lee's tweaks look way to green to me, so me and zombie agree on that, definitely do not like those settings.

Well, that's part of the process, trying the various adjustments and seeing what looks the closest to the theatrical appearance based on the best comparative sources we have available.

If we can get the flesh tones right, avoid too much of a greenish cast (if it wasn't present in theaters), and yet have good strong colors and contrast, it should end up pretty close to correct, given the source we have to work with.

I agree my screenshots aren't perfect.  I didn't think it ranged a little too far into orange skin tones (from the boosted yellow).  Ironically, I think Luke's flight suit should be more orange.

The problem is we don't have full spectrums to work with, so the portions we do have, increased, can look unnatural.

That's of course is assuming all colors were intended to be at or near full saturation.  There could also be other peaks I did not take into account without the whole film.

Any green-ness is not from me since I did not change its saturation.  It's probably subjective with the red reduced.  I think the answer is probably somewhere in between.  A smaller reduction in red (which unfortunately does feel more natural even if we know it to be wrong) and a smaller increase in the other colors.

If the over-green persists I would add a "G" to the color reduction line (along with the red).

So probably more like:

levels(3, 1.08, 255, 0, 255) #Note: Changes in gamma can effect

                                         #color saturation.

converttorgb() #required to use Hue filter

hue(channels="RYG", hue=5) #Adjust hue "CCW" for Red, Yellow, Green

hue(channels="YBM", sat=1.30)

hue(channels="R", sat=0.9) # add G if still too much green.

converttoyuy2() #If you are encoding using CCE

OK here is what I have been messing with compared to what DrM's suggestions look like after processing, now I know everyone and there brother bitches about the skin tones, hell I do to at times, but I find it hard to believe that Luke wouldn't have 1 hell of a tan(or even sun burn LOL) living out in a desert, and Han clearly has a tan because you can see the difference between his neck and face compare to his chest, well anyways here is what they look like, now keep in mind again as usual, THESE ARE NOT FINAL, it is just tweaking.

dark_jedi: I really like those corrections, I'm sure there's room for fine tuning, and certain scenes may need custom correction on a per-scene basis, but those are looking good. :) Nice flesh tones, good solid colors, etc.

Can you please post comparisons using those values for uncle Owen, aunt Beru and Luke sitting at the table?

Here is a comparison using DrM's new settings, would you guys rather me compare to the V3 as is instead?

I totally prefer DJ's settings here but it would be nice to see it compared to the original GOUT colours. And btw. from these shots V3 looks amazing in terms of picture quality, can't wait for this to be released :-)

I think DJ's shots look great.

Ditto. They look great; definitely light-years ahead of the GOUT, both in terms of colorization and overall picture quality. I'm really excited about this set.

Chewtobacca said:

DJ's shots do look good, but Doctor M's don't look half bad.  Either would be fine with me.

Is there also a difference in sharpness?

Both were run through the same script(g-force) so no difference but the colors.

If or When we decide that the color needs tweaking you guys have to keep in mind that I will have to re-render and encode ALL again, which is really no biggie, my PC can handle it, but once we figure what we want for SW, then we can move on to ESB and ROTJ.

New script, new shots.

I read the concerns and comments, and took a look again (still didn't test with g-force's script.)

It is apparent that there are really strong primary colors in the film.  The reds are true red (once the hue is adjusted +5).  Similarly, the blues start peaking at pure blue.  So now I adjust the all colors with the hue tweak.

I also knocked the Red back down to 90%.  Similarly, I lowered the Green and Cyan so they don't exceed the 75% boxes. 

This helps with some of the green issues.  To fix the orangey complexions I more conservatively increased yellow only 25% (along with the Magenta).

Blue I still increase strongly because the movie always feels like it needs more (which looking at the Technicolor print you can see they were lost completely in some scenes somewhere in the transfer process.)

Anyway, by reducing some additional colors and being more conservative with others that were causing problems, the reds which felt right originally (even though we know they're wrong), are now not washed out by the desaturation.

hue(channels="RYGBMC", hue=5) #Adjust hue "CCW"
hue(channels="YM", sat=1.25)
hue(channels="B", sat=1.4)
hue(channels="R", sat=0.9)
hue(channels="GC", sat=0.95)

Anyway, to my eye, this is the best looking version so far.

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@DJ: Did you disable g-force's Levels() adjustment when you inserted my filters?

LOL, yes I did.

I will try out your new settings, but to me, I do not agree with you, this is not the best I have ever seen, Han seems just a tiny bit pale, and Luke's suit is not orange enough, but this is my opinion only, it does look better, but not that much at all to me, and definitely wouldn't warrant a re-render, again just my opinion.

Looking at DrM's screenshots, I must say I think that there is very very little difference and the original GOUT shots actually look slightly better to me than the tweaked ones. In the tweaked shots everyone looks like they're ill.

I'll throw my lot in with those digging the v3 samples.

The only other answer is to leave the Red levels alone while bringing up everything else.  It seems like everyone like it that red.

Doctor M: It's not that they are too pale, it's that the faces take on an odd coloration with those adjustments. I think Harmy described it well, it's like they look sick or something, at least in certain scenes.

I'm not saying the degree of red in the faces in the other screen shots is exactly right. But if the choice is between the faces being a *little* too red, or looking sickly, I'd say lean towards a little red. Since that's a natural coloration in caucasians if the blood is near the surface (when blushing, for example) or they've been in the sun a bit too much. It looks more natural and should also be closer to the colors as they appeared in theaters, I would think.

Ideally, they would be light (fair), with maybe just a very slight touch of redness due to the sun exposure, but also not greenish or with odd darkish tinges to the skin. But it may be hard to get that just right with the GOUT DVD set as the source. Hopefully we can get it close.

Maybe somewhere in between dark_jedi's latest settings and yours?

And some scenes which maybe should be more blue may also need the blue boosted separately to get the correct appearance. This way other colors aren't overemphasized by a general boost in saturation to try to get the blues up where they should be.

You'd probably want to skip the hue adjustment as well since that moves most of the skin tones from red towards yellow.

I probably should take a look again, but I've lost motivation.  :-)

Something something

levels(3, 1.08, 255, 0, 255)
hue(channels="YM", sat=1.25)
hue(channels="B", sat=1.4)

-ish sort of thing.  Haven't tried it though.