Info: Digging up those blacks - using the STAR WARS Blu-ray for preservations — Page 4

Video Collector said:

Purple shadows are not necessarily an error.

In this case they are an error, since there are some reference materials like 70mm scans where areas being purple in the SE aren't purple in the original.

Harmy said:

We've been in a frequent PM contact but I'd like to thank You_Too publicly for these awesome corrections and for all his behind the scenes help with using them in my edit! And believe me, it was a lot of help and he's been great about it and I'm very grateful. :-)

Thank you! It feels great to help improve your awesome despecialized edition. :)

Harmy said:

Look at the blurry edges around Han and the obvious heavy DVNR applied. IIRC, they couldn't find the original elements for the scene when making the 97SE, so they used some dupe they dug out somewhere in the archives, so they had to scrub out a lot of grain to make it "fit" with the rest of the film and at this resolution, it shows pretty horribly. And even the 2004 Jabba looks really horrible. He looks like a f*cking oil painting in this picture :-/ Well, actually everything does, look at Han's hair!

Yeah, in my opinion that whole scene is like one big joke. Just the fact that Jabba doesn't look anything like in ROTJ, and then all that DVNR. Kinda funny actually by the way, I think my first thought when I saw this scene in 97 was "Jabba can move?" :) And the 97 Jabba looked way worse too.

Another post, but I just wanted to let everyone know that I've finally posted new screenshots in the first post.

Improvement after improvement, really good work. The colour/brightness corrections for the new shots are great in the closer more detailed areas, such as inside the Falcon where there is just that little bit more to see, and still keeping the finer details intact in the extreme close-ups. Best thing for me is that it looks 'old' again! Cool!!

Asaki said:

You_Too said:

...I think my first thought when I saw this scene in 97 was "Jabba can move?" :)

I think my first thought was "Wait a minute...didn't he just have this exact same conversation with Greedo not more than two minutes ago??" =|

I thought both of these exact thoughts, then I thought just thought, "Why?"

For 14 years.

You_Too, I just have to say that your color correcting looks DAMN good! and all the tweaks you show on others projects(Harmy, Puggo, etc.) just look very, very nice, you really have this color correcting stuff down, I truly wish I could color match\correct well, but I fully admit, it is definitely not my strong point, keep up the GREAT work, it is all looking good.

Thanks a lot dark_jedi! Like I told you in the pm, I would like to make a video tutorial on the basics of color correction sometime. If and when I manage to do it I'll probably put it in this thread.

You_Too, thank you so much for helping get these Blu-Rays looking as good as they can. With your most current Star Wars settings, are there any particular scenes you still think need some fine tuning a bit? I too am looking to do a render of this, but really a one-size-fits-all with maybe just a bit of tweaking of a few shots that still look wonky. I'm kind of getting burned out on having to fix Lucas' work each time a new video version of these comes out.

Also, you planning to post any Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi settings? Either way, thanks again for all your work! :)

Thanks Funcha!

Every single scene would probably need tweaking on it's own if you want it to be perfect, but then again, the only way to know what's the completely correct look for each scene would be to watch an original technicolor print.

If you use my settings for a render, think about how much better it looks than the raw blu-ray, at least!

Or you can wait for Harmy to finish his Star Wars despecialized v2.0 since it's based on a couple renders from me, with additional adjustments made to each scene. Not to mention how amazing work Harmy has done on removing the CGI stuff.

About ESB and ROTJ, we'll see. I'm currently taking a little break from it. I'm at least planning to make some kind of video tutorial on basic color correction using curves. We'll see when that happens too.

You_Too wrote: Every single scene would probably need tweaking on it's own if you want it to be perfect

Towards this goal, if you all find it of use, there's a spreadsheet which lists every shot in the SW films.  Feel free to take the spreadsheet and use it as a tool to help keep track of the color correction.  Maybe it's easy to drop the color correction settings into a cell/cells of the spreadsheet.  This way people could see what's been done and what's still left to do, and at the end will be a complete listing of how to color correct the films.

You_Too if you create a guide, that would be a great way to get other people involved and collaboratively with the spreadsheet, coordination of getting the whole film/s shot by shot corrected might happen a little sooner.

The spreadsheet can be found from this thread:

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Shot-List-Spreadsheet-v0500-6-films-publicly-editable/topic/13403/

Your spreadsheet thread is great, it's something that can be very useful for various projects.

Personally I won't attempt such a big project as a shot-by-shot correction though, the reason being I'm too impatient for such a thing. That's why I made this thread to help find a good basic overall correction, to take the first step to a better looking movie, then others can take the next. :)

If you get the time to make a tutorial using your corrections that would be great, I'd like to see how it works on the darker scenes - like inside Vader's Tie Fighter during the final trench run. Only if or when you get the inspiration. 

Cheers

Well Wavey, I think if I make a tutorial on color correction I'll probably make it more about how to use curves, what to do and what not to do.

When I made my settings for Star Wars, I took lots of screenshots from the movie and pasted them all inside one big image, then I checked what came out when I let photoshop auto-find the RGB mid-curves, and since it seemed to balance the colors more right, I stuck with it and just added my own gamma curve to make the picture brighter and dig up some shadow detail.

Then of course there was the selective color settings, but that's for another tutorial... :)

So anyway, basically I'm saying the tutorial won't be about how I did the Star Wars correction since that was partly done by photoshop. I think I'll do it a bit more about how to make those adjustments yourself, either using some source as reference to match another image to, or how to simply know what to do with an image to get more balanced colors.

That would be even more cool'r You_Too, always good to get a look in on other people's working methods - Thanks!

Hi You_Too. I love your color correction on this so far. I keep running into a problem trying to apply the deepblue filter though. When I input the code I get this error message...

Script error: ‘\’ can only appear at the beginning or end of a line

Script.avs, line 73, column 41

Hey Funcha,

Thanks a lot! It's been some months since I was working on this script though, since I'm busy with another project now.

Anyway, how to find out what causes the error is to open the script in notepad and press Ctrl+G and type in 73.

At that line I guess you'll have to remove the "\" if you find it.

Otherwise, try removing the whole thing and paste the script text into the file again. It should work, since I remember what I posted here did work.

Very odd. I took out the stray \ and end up with a syntax error. Completely lost as to how to fix deepblue. Wondering if anyone else having this issue?

Damn, had to reinstall my operating system as I had a hard drive crash and when I went to re-download the AviSynth plugins you posted MultiUpload is apparently gone. Anywhere you could re-up these You_Too? Thanks!