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Post #586462

Author
Spaced Ranger
Parent topic
THX 1138 "preservations" + the 'THX 1138 Italian Cut' project (Released)
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/586462/action/topic#586462
Date created
21-Jul-2012, 6:18 AM

Yes, definitely!

** BTW, a battery back-up gives much piece of mind. There's nothing like an orderly computer shutdown after the power goes out. ;) **

In anticipation of color correcting, I've been doing more concept brainstorming. Then I noticed that the paint program's curves results (from sampled points) looked familiar -- like when using the histogram expand and compress adjustments. This intrigued me as I'm still researching the "fade-fingerprint" (how film fades over time) technique for fade auto-compensation.

By using "midtones: expand / compress" (so named in this paint program) to individually restore the fade-flattened ranges of the RGB separations, and "gamma" to re-center the ranges when needed, I was able to manually step-back the fade ... in the way it faded (very pleased about that).

In the histogram function, the grey is the original fade damage and the resultant red-overlay is the correction. It is important to note that I made anti-fade adjustments by concept and only used the eye-dropper to verify high-end and low-end fine tuning:

The result is the best yet -- which included a pre-smoothing (an improvement over the post-smooth of my previous post), which prevented "new exaggerated grain" from forming in the first place:

Hopefully, this will translate well when using video tools.