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Post #1468300

Author
Chewielewis
Parent topic
Star Wars PSA upscale/remaster (WIP)
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1468300/action/topic#1468300
Date created
22-Jan-2022, 4:41 PM

I’d rather watch the before.

The problem I have with these sorts of remasters is that they don’t do the images any favors.

The source looks like an honest representation of the material, soft, low contrast, hazy, but believable. It’s what we expect from 50 year old analogue images.

But the processing delivers a fiercely digital image full of distracting artifacts. The AI turns soft fuzzy shapes into hard wobbly shapes while the sharpening flattens the image by making the background as sharp as the foreground, discarding any impression of depth. Also the color grading makes it uncomfortably high contrast. Essentially its “unnatural”.

In theory AI scaling should make great looking images, but in practice, it’s just polishing a turd. Taking something that was fine to begin with, and dressing it up till the real image behind it is obscured. In the before pic all I see is C3P0 and R2D2 on the death star in 1977, in the after pic all I see is image processing.

I think you can probably find a happy medium where the image looks ok on a big screen, but still looks pretty much like VHS. But to me, everything done here to make it look “better” just makes it worse.