Hi everyone,

I’m a new member but a long time lurker. I’ve learned a whole lot about film restoration on this site, so I owe you guys a lot for all that I’ve learned.

I’m currently working on a fan restoration of John Woo’s The Killer.

I’m a little unclear about the best method of color correction, however.

The best quality version I think happens to be a Scandinavian PAL DVD from a company called Scanbox. However, the best colors are still on the Criterion laserdisc and DVD.

What I intend to do is upscale and restore the Scanbox DVD version, then color grade it to match the Criterion.

Is there a consensus best method for color correction of this sort?

I’m aware of Dr Dre’s Color Matching Tool, but if I’m not mistaken that tool merely takes one frame as a reference and then applies that single reference histogram to multiple frames.

Wouldn’t it be better if you could match each identical frame to each other? Meaning, a tool that will create a new histogram per frame automatically, and apply the correction to the matching frame from the other source?

I know there have been many projects for color correcting Star Wars, but I haven’t followed all these projects closely.

Is there a general consensus best way to do color matching for a project like I’m describing?

Thanks for the help.