I’d also probably want to match the colors of the various sources better but I’d have to learn how to do that.
Dr. Dre’s Color Matching Tool* works very well.
I don’t have any info but will post again once I’ve watched them all. Early reviews seem to be the expected level of over-compression and too much noise reduction. I don’t know how complete they are (proper intros/outros, etc).
I’ve already had a few people ask whether I’ll incorporate these into a release. I don’t really have any plans to but who knows. Presumably I’d use them as a base and patch them with I guess upscaled versions of other films. It gets to the point where I’d need to do more work to make the different sources match better and I’d probably want someone with actual expertise to help out.
This review is one of the most interesting, since it compares screenshots of footage of the unrestored film scans (as shown in a special feature on the Blu-ray) with screenshots of the shorts themselves as they appear on the Blu-ray:
https://bluray.highdefdigest.com/115440/maxfleischerssuperman.html
It appears that not only Did Warner Brothers remove way too much grain, but they also messed with the colors.
As an experiment, I used Dr. Dre’s Color Matching Tool to color match the screenshots of the “restored” shorts on Blu-ray to the unrestored footage from the special features, then added some film grain in a photo editing program.
Unrestored:
Blu-ray:
Blu-ray color matched to unrestored footage with added film grain:
Unrestored:
Blu-ray:
Blu-ray color matched to unrestored footage with added film grain:
I think that these results look quite promising, and I just threw this together in a few minutes. With some grainier film grain overlay footage that approximates the grain level of the unrestored footage, I think that it would be possible to use the shorts on Blu-ray to make an excellent approximation of what a high-quality restoration with proper colors and grain should look like.
It might be necessary to color-match scene by scene, although I’m not 100% certain. I doubt that there’s a sample of unrestored footage of every scene (or even every short) on the Blu-ray special features, but maybe the DC Universe versions could be used as a color-matching source for the rest.