poita said:
Here is the segment for Spaced Ranger:
https://we.tl/QqRu36MOrd
Thanks!! (Sorry for the delay … I just had to try some tests immediately!)
I thought to try a Technicolorize™ (proportionally enriching evermore alone primaries) to get it stronger. Funny thing was, aside from it emphasizing the mis-registered edges, the interior color didn’t change much. It was almost like processing equal R-G-B . . . as in a B&W picture. Hmmm. So next was to align the registration (it looked like a simple horizontal stretch/squeeze) before trying again. And guess what happened . .
[old incorrect picture (wrong recombine produced “B&W”) replaced by corrected one (proper recombine)]
. . the picture went to B&W (mostly B&W, as I’m probably off by half-pixels or smeared resizing)!
. . nothing. The skin color, such as it is, was still there. (Pardon my previous test mess – I must’ve made a recombine with channel duplicated. Oh, well.)
It is interesting supposition that the early shot may have actually been B&W, by mistake (lost/damaged negative with only B&W dailies remaining) or deliberately (for a “monitor shot”). In the editing it was either lose the B&W shot (no time/budget for a monitor effect nor a re-shoot in color) or use it as is because it was such a good shot. Later (one of the GL re-releases) they tried to fix it up as best they could. Did they “invent” what we just found out? That making a deliberate mis-registration, and/or altering the brightness/contrast of the R-G-B channels, with hiding all the rough edges in the size reduction to consumer-grade releases, would result in a “passable color” shot?
Still … Look at every other shot of children in the movie – strong and saturated photography. But this shot stands alone in it’s oddly weak and unnatural color/tinting. … It still bothers me. Must work up a new theory . . .
| That’s my working theory at this point. |  |
 |
ADDED:
BTW, even without RGB alignment of this shot (the same if it was aligned and then deliberately misaligned), I resized it (consumer video size), set black (black leather) & white (lights) points, and added a touch more of saturation – all to the laserdisc snapshot values from early in this thread.
At least this shows it’s been the same over several releases … more or less. Hmmm.
film:
laserdisc:
