Thanks for all the info, guys! It all rang true to good bits I've picked up here & there on Star Trek 1960's film history, it's restorations for HD, and all that.
It got me to thinking, which led to this -- the possibility of a single, sweet-spot color correction across both live action & cartoon! How?
Well, I cheated on my R-G-B separations technique by using some of those other functions in the paint program. I'm sure this could've worked solely in the separations but there is no un-do when testing the input numbers (and I change them back & forth to see how they do). But I could un-do specific applications of those tools, to try again with other settings or with something else entirely.
It started when confirming that contorting the graph to get fox's shirt to show as "mint green" would not work well with the live action. Confirmed:
35mm targets for 16mm areas results
Setting specific color areas of the 35mm to the 16mm produced such spikes in the R-G-B graphs that it could not be useful elsewhere (and even affected inappropriate, other areas in the same picture).
From the previous discussion, it was clear that even the 35mm source was inaccurate of the actual production and cartoon cels. Cels! poita had just posted a really good cel with, dare I say it, real good color. So, this time, the 16mm color was set using the cel, on fox again. The graphs were somewhat rolling but not as spiked as from the 35mm. It turned out very dark but, oddly enough, the live action shots didn't look quite so bad. Manually smoothing out the graph lines improved not only the cartoon, but also the live action -- but still dark. To compensate, the control points were pushed upward to produce a lighter picture. It began to look amazingly better. A little more moving points gently upward produced this picture strip:
[EDIT: corrected the sequencing of the mis-numbered pictures]
16mm LUT capture with cel color - manually smoothed
Woah ... not only "mint green" cartoon shirt, but good looking white and black actors (a hard photographic task) ... all with the same setting! At this point, I stop manual manipulation and continued with the other paint program tools.
As this produced a strong orange tinge, Greyworld color balance color temperature was set to 6500K ("sunlight") to move the color cast cooler (bluer). Keeping in mind the stronger color of the 35mm, saturation was increased +25. Done:
& greyworld color balance @ 6500K & saturation +25
