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4k83 shot by shot color correction (a WIP)

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With the help of Stotchy, and SkyDude I’ve started work on the shot by shot correction of 4k83. The first pass and second pass for the color references have been finished:

The next step is to color match 4k83 to these references, and create LUTs, such that it can be applied to 4k83.

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Looks really good!

“Get over violence, madness and death? What else is there?”

Also known as Mr. Liquid Jungle.

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I’ve slightly updated the color grading (see OP), and increased the number of sample shots to 120 as for my TESB color grading.

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I’ve applied the above color grading to twelve frames of 4k83. Here’s a comparison with Sanjuro’s great work.

Sanjuro:

DrDre:

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Imho, the ships in the first scene were always too grey/blue since the Special Edition. The Stardestroyers had a slight beige tone while the other ships were bluish grey. And Endor had a little bit of green. So I fiddled a little bit with a 4K83 screenshot. Maybe the TIEs are a little bit too purple. What do you think?

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TK-949 said:

Imho, the ships in the first scene were always too grey/blue since the Special Edition. The Stardestroyers had a slight beige tone while the other ships were bluish grey. And Endor had a little bit of green. So I fiddled a little bit with a 4K83 screenshot. Maybe the TIEs are a little bit too purple. What do you think?

The colors were never that consistent throughout the OOT. The only film to more consistently feature beige star destroyers was ANH, and even there the tractor beam shot featured a blue star destroyer, or more likely a beige star destroyer lit with blue lighting.

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Here’s a larger set of test frames for my shot by shot regrade of 4k83 for the first third of the film.

Sanjuro:

DrDre:

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DrDre said:
The colors were never that consistent throughout the OOT.

It’s simple, they where basically white and what we see are color shifts due to the special effects.
With each photographic pass the film shifts a bit towards yellow, magenta or cyan… Here’s a random image that shows this: https://i0.wp.com/www.coffeewithkenobi.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/A-wing-ROTJ.jpg?ssl=1
Notice the Cyan window supports and specially the magenta A-Wing. Each element has a different shift.
Jedi, having more complex effects, suffers a lot from this.

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4throck said:

DrDre said:
The colors were never that consistent throughout the OOT.

It’s simple, they where basically white and what we see are color shifts due to the special effects.
With each photographic pass the film shifts a bit towards yellow, magenta or cyan… Here’s a random image that shows this: https://i0.wp.com/www.coffeewithkenobi.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/A-wing-ROTJ.jpg?ssl=1
Notice the Cyan window supports and specially the magenta A-Wing. Each element has a different shift.
Jedi, having more complex effects, suffers a lot from this.

I agree with you to an extend, but in many shots throughout the OT the star destroyers were lit with blue lighting, particulary in TESB and,ROTJ. The color in many shots is deep blue.

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The new batch of screenshots look good!

Only shots from the sample that bother me are the ones of Han and Leia on the barge. They look a bit too washed out to me.

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Here’s a larger set of sample frames.

Sanjuro set 1:

DrDre set 1:

Sanjuro set 2:

DrDre set 2:

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Just a little update, after some vacation, and some debugging I’m finally almost ready to start generating LUTs. Here are a couple of 1080p comparisons to show, what you can expect from this color grading.

Sanjuro:

DrDre:

Sanjuro:

DrDre:

Sanjuro:

DrDre:

Sanjuro:

DrDre:

Sanjuro:

DrDre:

Sanjuro:

DrDre:

Sanjuro:

DrDre:

Sanjuro:

DrDre:

Sanjuro:

DrDre:

Sanjuro:

DrDre:

Sanjuro:

DrDre:

Sanjuro:

DrDre:

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You always nail your colour corrections, Dre. Best I’ve seen ROTJ look. Very excited for your LUTs/the final product.

EDIT: Would also love to see the colours applied to the Blurays/1997 SEs. I grew up with the redone optical composites, and going back to the 1977-83 versions of those effects is always a little distracting to me (though I of course prefer most of the major changes reverted).

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Dre, I’m sorry about what happened at the other site. Just keep on keeping on and don’t let the others discourage you.

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Have to say, as far as I’m concerned this is looking to be the authoritative color grade for 4K83. I know that nothing’s ever 100% perfect and there will always be room for minor refinements, but it’ll be close enough for a lot of people. “We’re all done with color now, everyone drive carefully. Bye!”

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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Thanks for the vote of confidence! Here’s a larger set of comparisons between Sanjuro’s color grading, and the latest update of my own.

Sanjuro set 1:

DrDre set 1:

Sanjuro set 2:

DrDre set 2:

Sanjuro set 3:

DrDre set 3:

Sanjuro set 4:

DrDre set 4:

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I’d be interested in seeing more examples of the Rancor differences, if you have them. I like the frame you showed, but it doesn’t appear to be the exact same frame as the Sanjuro example.

Also, I know there seems to have been a great deal of difficulty making some of these Rancor shots color-consistent, possibly because they simply aren’t very consistent. In particular, there’s a one shot (Luke starting to hide under rocks as the Rancor lumbers into the frame in the foreground) where Harmy’s correction showed realistic skin tones for Luke, at the cost of the Rancor looking extremely desaturated. Sanjuro got the Rancor looking consistent with the surrounding scenes, at the cost of Luke looking unnaturally red-faced. I wanted to see where your correction landed with this one, considering your skin tones in general seem to line up better with Harmy’s color correction.

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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Here are two sets of frames from the Rancor scene: