Star Wars Trilogy SE bluray color regrade (a WIP) — Page 18

DrDre said:

I’ve updated three shots. I think the others are fine as they are.

Yikes… sunburn city. Are you trying to fight that “green tint” in the faces by adding the extra red? Maybe instead look for another way to fight it (like only desaturing that color, which isn’t green, it’s more like orange-green when it should be just peach instead.) But honestly, the last one you did before these looked fine (great even)… I didn’t even notice the green tint anymore unless I was zoomed in 800% on the skin pixels.

(The ones I like better)

I’ve reduced the saturation somewhat, but it still needs some tweaking…

Dek Rollins said:

Dreamaster said:

DrDre said:

Yikes… sunburn city. Are you trying to fight that “green tint” in the faces by adding the extra red? Maybe instead look for another way to fight it (like only desaturing that color, which isn’t green, it’s more like orange-green when it should be just peach instead.) But honestly, the last one you did before these looked fine (great even)… I didn’t even notice the green tint anymore unless I was zoomed in 800% on the skin pixels.

I’d also like to point out, since the “green blotches” keep popping up in the skin area, that those apparent blotches are natural fluctuations of skin tone. DeEd 2.5 had some real blotches, and some of Dre’s work in progress, but those “finalized” ones didn’t have any green issues in the skin tones.

The green is also apparent in Greedo’s “outer sleeve” with what, probably not coincidentally, is supposed to be a yellow/orange/peach color. In Verta’s shot you can see the right color, in Dr. Dre’s regrade it’s went quite green-ish there instead as well. I think it’s something that went wrong in the blu ray coloring… so when that horrible magenta is corrected out it’s still leaving small errors like for whatever reason, substituting peach for a green-tinted cyan throughout the film. If anyone can fix it I’m sure it’s Dr. Dre!

I went back to my original grading for the Tarkin scene, except for a slight modification. The Han and Chewie shot is a bit too bright when you compare it to other references, so I also slightly adjusted that shot. Most of the finished shots are on the first page, but I will also make a gallery.

Overall looks good. Reds seem to be kicking a tad in the shadows of the death star meeting shots.

Those look really good, NeverarGreat! Mike Verta is adamant that the Death Star walls are never green, but always bias towards blue.

DrDre said:

Those look really good, NeverarGreat! Mike Verta is adamant that the Death Star walls are never green, but always bias towards blue.

I tend to believe him here, not just because of his expertise, but because every time I correct for the proper colors of skin and costumes, the walls end up looking dark, slightly desaturated blue. I rarely, if ever, run into a situation where they end up looking green.

NeverarGreat said:

This is my best guess as to how this scene should look. The Death Star Walls are blue and green. Tarkin’s uniform, as has been discussed on my thread, is green (although color problems in the blu-ray don’t allow many color gradients here, which is why Tarkin’s hair has gone a bit green).

The attempts to make the walls neutral just look dead to me, like the home video releases where the color has been washed out.

Very, very nice. Dre’s latest images look great too. But it’s damn tough to balance those walls to be a reasonable shade of blue. Since you’re working with Harmy, I’ve very excited for his 3.0, which he says should be technicolor inspired but more modest than before.

I believe I’ve finally found a reference, that agrees with Mike Verta’s statement, that the walls bias towards ble, and I think it looks awesome:

What do you think?

I’m thinking that these colors are looking pretty decent:

Cushing’s uniform has decent colors, and the walls are a “Proper Blue”? Saturation might be a bit too high though?

NeverarGreat posted this:

Slightly different frame, but my take using the Silver Screen Edition and manual photoshop adjustment. I’ve got it so that the walls have a much greater blue tint and Tarkin’s uniform is green, whilst keeping a natural skin tone, no masking was done.

I used no reference apart from your comments, I felt DrDre’s results leave a yellow blotchiness to the faces which I disagree with.

NeverarGreat said:

Out of all the ones I’ve seen, these look the best to me. I can’t speak towards its authenticity as well as others, but to me this looks correct.

Again with no reference, this time I reused the same adjustment layers across all these Silver Screen Edition screenshots, Im aware it is probably too blue but I’d like to note the green uniforms, warm skin tones, the table is a satisfying black and the lights give a good glow on the uniforms.

bishabosha said:

Again with no reference, this time I reused the same adjustment layers across all these Silver Screen Edition screenshots, Im aware it is probably too blue but I’d like to note the green uniforms, warm skin tones, the table is a satisfying black and the lights give a good glow on the uniforms.

I’m sorry. The colors themselves look fine but it’s almost comically saturated and contrasty.

NeverarGreat said:

I think it looks quite good, I’d just make sure that Tarkin’s uniform remains green even in the shadows.

As you know my corrections have been manual in contrast to your algorithm. I think that this provides certain advantages. I was able to achieve my results with only a curves adjustment, saturation adjustment, and the channel mixer. The channel mixer is one of the most versatile tools on account of it’s ability to reduce the stressed color of the blu-ray. If the green-green channel is lowered and mixed into the red and blue channels, it reduces the green artifacts that pop up on the skin tones in these scenes, as well as give Tarkin’s skin tone a more consistent hue. Also, where the skin tones are a great deal darker than the film sources suggest, one way to fix this is to boost the red-red channel, then mix green-red and blue-red (while keeping the totals of these mixes at 100 of course). The result is reds which are substantially lighter and less saturated than the Blu-ray, and a good match to film sources. Of course you must keep an eye on the solid red, green, and blue lights in these scenes to make sure they don’t become too diluted, but often these lights are too saturated anyway. This makes me think that a channel mixer tool was used on the Blu-ray to get the colors this distorted in the first place, otherwise it wouldn’t work so well in fixing these problems.

The problem is not in the algorithm, but in the quality of the reference. For example, if I use the algorithm to match the bluray to your regrade,

NeverarGreat:

Bluray matched to NeverarGreat with algo:

So, if the reference is of high enough quality, the algorithm can probably reproduce it, to a high degree of accuracy.

I think your regrades are the best I’ve seen so far for these shots, so I think I will stay close to your grading for this scene. One thing I noticed in your regrade of the Tarkin shot, is that the walls have more teal, than for the other shots. I suspect this is, because you wanted to keep Tarkin’s atire green, which conflicts with the desire to have less green in the walls. The strength of the algorithm, is that it can solve such conflicts of interest. For example, I can manually adjust specifically for the teal to be blue, using GIMP:

By doing this, Tarkin’s atire has the same green color, but the walls are now consistent with the other shots, which is difficult with curves adjustment. Subsequently, I can match the bluray to this adjusted grading:

The algorithm is in a sense a form of automated curves adjustment. If you use only one color space, it in fact is automated curves adjustment in the RGB color space. The curves are adjusted, by matching the cumulative probability distributions for the red, green, and blue channels. The problem is that this somewhat limits your degrees of freedom in terms of the colors than can be reproduced independently. This is why the algorithm repeats the same curves adjustment procedure in up to 100 different color spaces.

I think there’s been enough experimenting. I’ll be on a short break to work on my house, but when I return, I will start regrading the bluray from the first shot to the last. I will put a frame for each regraded shot in this album, which now only contains the first shot:

http://imgur.com/a/YSoJf

Bluray:

Bluray regraded:

Before my hiatus, here’s what my interpretation of the Tarkin shot is, based on the 70 mm frames, correcting for the green shift. It ended up looking somewhat different from NeverarGreat’s version, with a somewhat higher color dynamic. However, it has blue walls, Tarkin’s jacket is green, the skin tone looks natural, and his eyes are a piercing blue. I think it’s my most photo realistic attempt so far:

I think it’s on the right track, but it feels too dark to me and i think you could dial back the green a bit. His uniform isn’t really GREEN it’s more like olive. A weird side effect of this is you’ve made tarkin’s grey hair almost completely green.

I do love them walls though.

A quick correction in PS. Sorry I feel like I do this every time you post a frame. I mean no disrespect. But I think this is probably closer.

It’s fine. 😃 Here’s my adjustment. It needed a red boost in the darker tones, and I’ve made it a little brighter. Somehow the eyes look more alive with the boosted blue tones, compared to some of the earlier attempts, but I think this is the one for me: