The Aluminum Falcon said:

SilverWook said:

I guess we would need a good print of Dr. No to compare.

IIRC, Terence Young mentioned something about the day-for-night sequences in Crab Key during his infamous Criterion commentary and how prints would rarely get it right. Presuming, he actually approved the Criterion master or even was watching the master while recording the commentary, the Criterion LD might be your best bet of what's right.

I'm of the opinion, though I honestly don't have much to back it up, that the Criterions are the most faithful in terms of how the movies looked theatrically. Judging by the high contrast and grain, they seem to be from prints rather than IPs, so may have an additional generation of grain/color variation.

Do you think there's any way to tweak the Lowry transfers?

One would need extreme time and patience.

You could probably color correct it relatively accurately with time and patience, doing it scene by scene at least if not shot by shot. But, you're still left with the issue of the DVNR. I suppose, with care, you could use artificial grain sparingly.

Harmy's Despecialized turned out really nice video-wise and those were similarly-treated transfers by Lowry.

Just checked-The SE DVD looks the same. Perhaps the Criterion LD might have different coloring in this particular instance. I'm almost 100% sure they used prints rather than IPs.

The issue with using any of the Lowry transfers is that they already removed detail and then added in layers of fake grain to cover it up. We can re-time them as best as we can, but still it isn't ever going to be exactly like what was originally there.