Info Wanted: Calling all Color Correctors: Can this source yield a different set of results to Gout? — Page 2

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Sorry -1, I have had trouble with formatting posts in the message board since I got a new laptop/system but I found a work round now to post images

frank678 said:

Well despite the extremely unlikely prospect that a retro fullscreen/analog revival kicks in sometime in the future, I did find I could dig better colors out of another source, which was the Starkiller 82 Preservation, again it degraded the image but again working with original raw captures of the source laserdisc might yield a more pleasing result (or maybe not). Also someone who understood working color correction programs properly might get a more refined result.

The point for me was to try find the least red-shift damaged digitized/digitizable source and see what came out through color correction...

Original:

Correction attempt:

 

I would probably avoid doing a color restoration project on a laptop.  That is about as far away from a calibrated monitor as you can get.  Especially with some of the terrible viewing angles on those things.

No offence, as I am sure that some of these look good on your laptop, but to the rest of use they look terrible.  Again, it may just be the setup that you are using.

EDIT: also, how much does Mark Hamill look like Jane Krakowski (Jenna Maroney from 30 Rock) in that pic?  creepy.

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I think the main problem with the 80s transfers is not inaccurate color so much as completely inaccurate levels. The brightness, contrast, gamma, etc. were adjusted during the transfer process so that it would look good on the TVs of the time. Everything has a flat, low-contrast, and often overly bright look (especially in darker scenes like the binary sunset or R2 in the canyon, where the brightness/gamma was obviously turned up).

I don't think these old transfers were timed differently from scene to scene - cinch believes that only general tweaking was done to get the image to match it to the specs of analog video and the TVs of the time. The main adjustments seemed to be to flatten the contrast and boost the gamma.

When a print was transferred to video via film chain (the way movies were run on TV before telecine), the image was always blown out, because film prints have a higher contrast and dynamic range that the analog video of the time could not reproduce. Dark areas would come out as black, light areas would come out as bright washes, and detail would be lost. The ITV airing of the film seems to have that kind of blown-out look; my theory is that they received a print and transferred it themselves, standard operating procedure for film on over-the-air TV at the time.

With that in mind, here's what I was able to get out of the original version of that Luke screenshot just by playing with the brightness/contrast settings in Microsoft Office Picture Manager. I turned the shadows down, turned the highlights up, brought up the midtones a bit, and turned up the contrast. As for the color saturation, I found that I got a better result by turning it *down*, not up. After I did my level adjustments, the colors looked too strong, and as Mike Verta says, the film had muted colors. This is the end result:

Here is a before-and-after comparison of the two (at half-size, to obscure the video noise, compression, and the additional artifacting caused by my adjustments):

I don't think this is exactly how the colors looked on film, and I couldn't bring the contrast up any more without making it look horrible, but it feels a lot closer. It has the warm temperature and fairly muted color that Mike talks about.

These are the tests I did in the other thread:

The original images were screenshots of a PAL video, and my adjustments involved no actual color correction, only brightness/contrast/gamma/saturation. As you can see, they also feel closer to what we know about the original colors.

Adjusting the old 80s transfers will not definitively determine the accurate colors, but if the film source had timing close to the original theatrical version, adjusting the levels to approximate the higher contrast of film might help point us in the right direction. In short, we can't get accurate color out of these sources, but we may be able to find "clues" to the color balance of the scene.

Besides these releases being in pan-and-scan, the adjustments I'm doing cause crushing, blowout and other detail loss, as well as amplifying existing artifacts, so my corrections would look awful in motion. I'm only trying to figure out the balance of the colors; I don't think that watchable color-corrections of these releases are possible. I'm doing this to help -1 with his 35mm project, since the print is not faded, but the transfer still has to be color-corrected.

In the Colortiming and Cinematography thread, I explained that even if the color timing on the film was close to the '77 theatrical color, analog NTSC video was incapable of accurately reproducing it, hence the old joke among supporters of PAL that it stands for "Never Twice the Same Colour." I believe that captures of 80s PAL laserdiscs would be more helpful than the NTSC ones we have. Anybody on this forum have any?

Now if I could just get you to calibrate my monitor I might be able to keep up with this subject matter better..

TServo2049 (or anyone) this is bugging me and probably has something to do with the complexities of color transfer but why does this 82 LD have so much extra colour in the bottom half of the picture? Here it is without my adjustment

Here is a shot from the actual location from an online site

I don't understand if the skies sort of match why the bottom half doesnt? Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I've probably posted enough of them already one more isnt going to hurt

There's plenty of reasons why it would look different. It's probably a different time of day in the bottom photo. Also, that's a still photo taken in the 2000s; I don't know if it was a digital camera or a film camera, but either way it's not going to look like 70s motion picture film stock.

The choice of film stock, the camera exposure setting, use of filters, and other things determine what a filmed image looks like, even before the final color timing. It can't be replicated using a modern consumer still camera, whether film or digital.

Thanks for providing the uncorrected 82 LD image of the sunset.

 I thought colour correction might be a miracle restorative but the more I understand it the information in these sources is not deep enough to stand much boosting without destroying the picture

The ITV broadcast is interesting - there's no burn marks, but there's different cropping, the color looks quite different, and it has the 1977 flyover (but the Episode IV crawl). It's obviously not from the same video master as the PAL video releases.

In fact, I bet that ITV didn't receive the film on tape. It looks like they were sent a pre-cropped, Academy-ratio, mono print and transferred it themselves, probably using a film chain hooked up to a VTR instead of an actual telecine. The blown-out contrast, blue-green cast and slightly yellowish highlights remind me of how movies looked on local (U.S.) TV stations in the 70s and early 80s, when they ran 16mm prints live on film chain.

My theory is that the version ITV got was originally prepared for airlines. There are airline prints of the films out there, and from what I can gather, airlines didn't show movies in widescreen. They were Academy-ratio, mono 16mm prints, so a cropped, mono print master had to have existed prior to the video releases.

This would also better explain why the Greedo subtitles on the old video releases are "burned in" and not video-generated - it makes more sense if they used an already-existing subtitled cropped element made for previous non-widescreen versions like airline prints (there aren't any Super 8 digests with the Greedo scene, are there?).

This would also explain the 1977 flyover - I'm assuming that the film element that was used for the ITV print didn't say "Episode IV," and the new crawl was tacked on for this version. (I'd love to watch the ITV version and see how it cuts from the Ep IV crawl to the '77 flyover...)

Damn, well you're info on the TV broadcast versions now has pretty much killed my interest. I was looking at other photos from Tunsia locations just before the sun sets and combining that with what you pointed to about the different limitations of different capture methods, filtering etc. and when I look at a sunset like the following which contains so many different colours and brings out so many colours I don't see how the matter of the binary sunset can ever be settled definitely,

(more blue, more purple, more yellow, more sandy, more light, are too vague here + how is an early tv/vhs/laserdisc going to capture this complexity)

As far as the ITV version, the problem is that I don't have it, and I haven't seen the whole thing.

And actually, the matter of the binary sunset *is* settled, and it's been discussed at length in other threads. We know what it's supposed to look like. Harmy has seen frames from an unfaded Technicolor print, and Mike Verta has seen a Technicolor print projected on 70s equipment.

This is what it looks like in the latest workprint of Harmy's Despecialized Edition 2.0:

Puggo Grande transfer:

Catnap bootleg:

With the old 80s transfers, when I'm color-correcting pictures I have to do it differently for each scene. It's possible to make them look more like the original colors, but I find that if I take the corrections I applied to one image and try them on another one, it doesn't come out right. And as some of the color information from the film got lost in the transfer to video, even if I can make the colors look closer, some of them are just not there (like the blue you talked about from that Derann image).

FYI, here's what I did to the sunset image you posted:

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frank678 said:

I thought colour correction might be a miracle restorative but the more I understand it the information in these sources is not deep enough to stand much boosting without destroying the picture.

I was just playing around with screenshots of the '82 LD version of the Greedo scene, and you're absolutely right. Here's the original image - notice how everything looks brown and gray, including Greedo's skin:

And this is what I had to do to get the contrast and colors anywhere close to how it looked originally:

I'm surprised I was able to recover even that much. Look at the extreme white clipping on the subtitles, and the reflection on Greedo's eye. The chroma noise from the video signal is exaggerated to a ridiculous degree, especially in the walls. It reminds me a 256-color GIF image from 1995. The low contrast and high gamma of these transfers (especially in dark scenes) means that for some scenes, the image literally does have to be destroyed to even approximate the original colors.

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Technidisc with instructions for VLC settings