Atom-88 said:

Good to hear Eyepainter, would love a link once completed 😁

Thanks, Atom. I’ll be happy to send it once I’ve finished it.

I’ve just about completed tweaking the black levels on the color grading. However, I have a few caveats. I’ll demonstrate by showing off some more screencaps.

Now, in a perfect world, I could just lower the black levels and the only thing being affected would be the black levels. However, that’s easier said than done. No matter how careful I am, the entire image follows suit by default, and the natural result is a darker image as you can see in the spoiler tag below. The top examples are the original grade, while the bottom examples are the tweaked grade:

Because of this, the tweaked grade is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, since darker areas now look more accurate. A curse, because this means that some of the details are too dark to see. The bushes in the example below reveal this problem:

The next few examples show how the black levels look during brighter scenes. Both for better and for worse.

These next few screencaps show what the black levels look like in darker scenes; especially those at nighttime. You’ll notice that some of the details are either harder to see or gone completely in the tweaked grade:

The asylum scenes were the first major red flags that the black levels needed to be readjusted. The first example looked like daytime on my HDTV. Hopefully, the tweaked grade has fixed that problem.

More examples of how the black levels are affected during daylight scenes.

The assassination attempt on Miles Dyson was the biggest reason I decided to readjust the black levels. Look at the nighttime sky in the top example. Yikes!

This particular shot has been quite troublesome. I’m not sure if it’s entirely my fault, because the Skynet Edition that I’m using also suffers from this. Take a look. This is literally what’s on the blu-ray:

I don’t know if the film prints were deteriorating at the time or if something happened during the telecine, but the dark gray nighttime sky definitely looks wrong. The bottom example below is perhaps the best reason for the tweak:

Look at Sarah Connor’s outfit in this example:

My last screencap is one that oughtta be familiar for the fans. It too shows the strengths and weaknesses of the tweaked grade:

That’s it for now. What do you think? Does it still need some readjusting, or does it look just right?