Darth Editous said:
Mike, the STAR WARS logo screenshot, on the same page as the colour fidelity one - has that had "stuff" done to it? I ask because the central yellow colour is exactly the same throughout - [255,237,0] - whereas the outer edges show some variation.
DE
Technically, that's an interim shot, but here's the general process with optical titles:
First, that slight fringing at the edges is typical of optical titles and you don't want to kill that. Tiny as it may be in context, you can actually feel it and miss it when it's gone. Secondly, for many reasons, color on film can vary from frame to frame in unintended ways. The Tatooine sand is legendary for this: if you isolate sections and really watch, the sand goes from pink to green to blue to yellow to green to pink to... it's all over the map. The stormtroopers in the compare shot have the same problem actually. Now, obviously that's not inherent in the photography or natural, it's a photochemical byproduct, usually of aging. One tool that I use watches pixel values for a given time and determines the average value. In the case of the title, it is no surprise that the internal color then stabilizes itself to a consistent value. But this tool also has the often unintended effect of completely removing the grain pattern. That happens a lot, actually, as I have another tool which recovers details from within changing grain structure. As it recovers, it also eats all the grain off.
But of course, the grain element is still known... and it's easy to put back after the fact, without having to regenerate new grain. By the way, generating new grain is done all the time in restoration, and even though it is virtually flawless (grain patterns for known stocks can be perfectly replicated), the purist in me likes to see the specific grain pattern on a shot put back. Of course, that's only the grain pattern for a specific print/source (no two are exactly alike) but that's generally what I do. Pull it out so I can stabilize color and recover details, and then put it back. So with the title, you're essentially seeing the grain-free interim image. The comparison stormtroopers/Leia shot, on the other hand, has its grain intact.
_Mike