two things doc…
This is worthy of a Nobel Prize. Not joking, millions could benefit from this technology.
I think you would end up removing any intentional color timing from the film. Think about it. Take a photo, adjust the colors without clipping any of them too badly. Take the original photo and do it again. Do it in whatever color space you want. Now hit the button on each of the differently timed photos. They all get back to being pretty neutral, right? I’m not complaining, as this is an amazing tool in color recovery, but I don’t think you can say these were the colors on opening day.
-G
I agree you would, if you would correct shots individually. However, the idea with correcting a film reel, is that you calibrate the model on shots you know to have a neutral color (or no delibirate color cast), like the majority of the Tantive IV scenes. If you include enough shots, the average distributions of the red, green, and blue channels should converge for an unfaded print, allowing you to accurately estimate the color shifts for each color channel, and for each color intensity. You then apply this correction to the entire reel, which is what I did in the examples I showed for Star Wars. All the color relations between shots remain intact, since you apply a uniform correction across scenes. Unless the shots you chose originally had an intentional color cast or an unintentional color imbalance (and even in then it would have to be an imbalance that persists across scenes or an entire reel), the final result should be an accurate representation of the original color timing.