pat man said:

Lower the contrast and increase the gamma a little bit.that should make the skin tones look better without losing the colors in the movie.

The GOUT has a way too soft contrast, that's why the opposite was done to make it look more like the original prints, at least with the contrast/gamma.

Trust me, after trying hundreds of variations of the script, I'm sure it looks best this way.

No problem! Of course everyone has the right to have opinions.

And I think everyone will think it's oversaturated at first, because our eyes are used to the GOUT being washed out.

You_Too said:

Trust me, after trying hundreds of variations of the script, I'm sure it looks best this way.

Based on these new stills and the amount of time you've been analysing the GOUT source I would put money on this next version being the best overall colour correction of GOUT ever. Looking forward to it!

@frank678: Thank you! Yeah, there sure has been a lot of work on the color correction, and even more on cleaning up the bad frames.

@pat man: Yeah, watching on a calibrated screen is the best thing to do if you want to see how it really looks.

Unfortunately, most people who will watch this probably don't have calibrated TVs or projectors, but hopefully it will look good to them as well since the colors are pretty neutral overall.

@AntcuFaalb: Once all three movies are done and the blu-rays released, I'll post the scripts, or well, not all the theatrical sub parts and all that, but I'll post the parts of the scripts that can be useful for other similar projects.

With similar projects I mean that they could maybe prove useful in Laserdisc upscales if somebody was to do that, or to improve/upscale any movie with the same problems as the GOUT with jagged edges and stuff.

And DJ is just as involved as before. He's just taking some time off the forum.

@AntcuFaalb: You mean with incorrect aspect ratio and such things?

Since our renders for all three films are already done, and we've worked so much on fixing bad frames already, we can't go back and change any crop settings or anything now, so if there's scenes with some slightly different aspect, we'll have to live with it.

Anyway, each film was cropped to remove black borders, any edge discoloration and stripes on edges.

Here's how that frame looks in our version:

^ Some examples are mentioned/shown here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-Original-Trilogy-Theatrical-Editions-Info-ALL-versions-SEE-FIRST-POST-FOR-INFO-AND-AVAILABILITY/post/577325/#TopicPost577325

I've explained it earlier in the thread but I understand if you don't wanna go back and search for it.

First I analyzed the whole movie scene by scene, writing down any frame that had glue marks, big dirt marks, stripes, flashes or light bleeding from frames before and after a frame, for example. (There were hundreds) And now we've also added scenes with color errors to the list.

DJ has extracted them from the render and I'm fixing them all in photoshop. Then DJ will take care of reinserting the fixed frames.

EDIT: @none: Thanks for adding that. :)

Dunedain said:

It does indeed sound like it will be great with all the fixes. :) Perhaps individual clean frames from an HD broadcast source of the SE might be helpful in replacing some frames that are messed up? Since it's just a frame here and there, any slight differences in color after correction should not be noticeable.

It's not really a frame here and there. Or in a way, it is.

For SW we wrote down about 350 frame sequences that needed fixing. Usually when there's a glue mark or dirt for example, thanks to the smearing in the source it appears in more than one frame.

I clean it up very carefully and if I don't absolutely need to use the SE I don't. So far I've used the SE for 1 single frame only, and it was because there was a white piece of dirt over Luke's hair where he battles the sand people. There was no way to reconstruct that part so I took the SE and made the colors match.

Dunedain said:

This new version, of course, will have even more saturation to the scenes now, so you might want to try that script that isolates the skin from all else in a scene and applies a different color correction value to it. Even if there isn't enough color detail in the source to color correct the skin tones accurately, at least it would allow the rest of the scene to be saturated to any high level to bring the background colors back closer to where they should be without affecting the skin tones themselves. Allowing them to be kept restrained and more accurate and not be pulled along with the rest of the scene and made orange, reddish/burnt, etc. A quick test of how it looks might prove interesting. :)

Using the GOUT as source, you can't isolate the skin tones. The color of skin is shared with lots of other things. For example, when Luke and Han are talking about saving the princess, the red panels in the background share color with the skintones. In the 70mm shot of the same scene, they're nicely separated. There is no way to do this type of correction with the GOUT, unfortunately.

But, after lots and lots of analyzing again, I've worked out a script that will make it a bit more balanced and not as oversaturated-feeling as it was. I also noticed I needed to change the hue of yellow slightly. This has to be done after all the cleanup is finished.

I haven't talked to DJ about it yet, but I will do that very soon.

Dunedain said:

Very interesting about the frames. So to fix a part of a frame that has, say, a scratch, you go the frame before or after that isn't scratched. And then find that same part of the clean image that matches the frame that is scratched, and place the clean pixels from that part of the image into their correct places in the scratched frame, so it's all correct and accurate when it's done?

That's one method. Sometimes it's a bit more complicated, especially if it's a scene with lots of motion.

Dunedain said:

As to the colors, I see the problem, hmm...tough one to get around. But it's good that you've been able to come up with a way to get the overall saturation levels back closer to where they should be, while protecting the skin tones to a greater degree. Look forward to seeing the latest color correction method. Perhaps you could post that same shot of Han like on the previous page, would be interesting to see how the different methods compare.

I thought about that too, and here's a comparison of before and after.

Notice how the "oversaturated-glow" is gone now, and that Han's shirt also looks more accurate thanks to the slight hue change in yellows.

Dunedain said:

Thanks for the level of effort being put by dark jedi and yourself into trying to make this restoration as accurate as possible. :)

Thank you for appreciating it. :)