msycamore said:
I played around with the 16mm footage today to see if I could get it to look somewhat acceptable, here's my result on "The Lost Scene." http://www.sendspace.com/file/twyqdo
Let me know what you think. Ignore the audio, at the moment I don't know what the heck is causing it to get out of sync!
Before
After
I'm afraid there's not that much color left to work with but I do think it's watchable in this state, maybe Puggo or someone else with more experience than me when it comes to color correcting could get it to look even better for an eventual "grindhouse DVD."
It's an improvement but a more effective approach is needed (BTW, what is your approach?) to make the best of the remaining faded color (in RGB, the red-blue suffers the most from fade). For example, this is a pretty tough frame on which to adjust white balance because there are no visible highs, mediums, and lows (yes, all three) of guaranteed grey objects on this source, except for bright white uniforms.
However, we can cheat (oops, did I say that?) and use as guide an original print. In this case, I capped old broadcasts from TNT (fullscreen) and Bravo (widescreen) -- say "hello" Coilly (nyuk, nyuk, nyuk):
Well, what do you know, that background wall was originally grey! Cheats are good! My personal preference for accurate color is of the widescreen, but for sake of A-B comparison, I've used the fullscreen for this demonstration.
First, locate high (1), medium (2), and low (3) originally-grey-areas to sample:
Of course, getting a good grey-scale spread is key to good color-correction. Sometimes, one simply cannot use a single frame and must sample across multiple frames (of the same scene) to get the needed spread. Also, a sample will be better if taken by an "eye-dropper" that can grab a radius of pixels for an average value (minimizes noise errors). The following are RGB values pulled from the 16mm source and TNT target areas:
R ... G ... B
----- ---- ----
157 218 183 - 1 "high" source area
201 198 212 - 1 "high" target area
----- ---- ----
129 146 129 - 2 "medium" source area
123 122 127 - 2 "medium" target area
----- ---- ----
112 078 083 - 3 "low" source area
085 085 085 - 3 "low" target area
Then use the source-target points for input-output values to skew the R-G-B scales for color compensation:
And, yes, it works:
If the color-fade is mostly uniform throughout the 16mm print, a single/best adjustment (or sampled RGB points, from across the entire movie, averaged together) may suffice for the entire film.