Previously (the Fleischer Superman Cartoons thread), I was thinking about a Technicolorizer in a paint program using functions that would also be available in Avisynth (overlays, inversions, scaling, etc.). But I just had a brainstorm (ooooh pretty lightshow) for a different approach. The paint program has a colorwheel for hue, saturation, and lightness adjustments. It also has the alternate function of breaking down the spectrum into R-G-B C-Y-M divisions to apply adjustments on those divisions independently.

The whole idea of the Technicolorizer is to restore the strong-primary-colors look of Technicolor’s narrow spectrum sensitivity to the 3 colors that make up film and make it’s films “pop”.

Other film stock are not as narrow and each color picks up neighboring secondary colors – resulting in a comparative muted colors.

In this quick test using the colorwheel, I adjusted the saturation higher than one normally would want, to make more obvious the differences between the various saturation applications. (Sorry for this rushed and abbreviated article. Even this little write-up gobbled more time than I have to put to it.)

The 1st picture is the recent scan. (Keep watch on background foliage and hand & face color.)
The 2nd is your every-day, standard, whole-spectrum saturation of +50. Typically, nice coloring on everything also results in glowing skin.
The 3rd uses the colorwheel’s divisions to saturated, to +50, only the R-G-B divisions of the spectrum. Notice that we’ve achieved stronger color in many areas than picture 2, without making the skin any worse. But our R-G-B spectrum is not yet narrow enough.
The 4th picture uses the spectrum divisions to over-raise the R-G-B areas to +70 and the whole spectrum to drop everything down, by -20. (This gets us back to the test level saturation of +50.) It has the effect of not only raising the R-G-B, but also lowering the adjoining secondary colors – the ultimate Techinicolor spectrum-narrowing simulation! Notice the colors really come out on everything and the skin glowing has actually subsided. (It should look even more natural at a +40-ish saturation target.)