kk650 said:
I personally wouldn't base a regrade for an entire film on the colours in a trailer, trailer colours are notoriously unreliable as poita said in the other thread and of course only show the colours of a few scenes, all the other scenes you'd have to guess at what they're meant to look like colourwise.
The trailer looks like it has a blanket blue tint all over it. You can see that especially in the bar scene in the trailer, it looks exactly as I think it must have looked on location when it was shot (ungraded basically) but with a blanket blue tint added to it. If you prefer that ungraded look, which I can understand, you have the problem of not knowing what other scenes not shown in the trailer would look like with the trailer's more neutral ungraded colour scheme. You'd be creating a film with a mismash of graded scenes taken from the blu-ray and ungraded scenes whose colours were taken from the trailer, creating an inconsistent colour scheme overall IMHO.
If you try to transfer the look of the trailer to the entire film I think you're just going to end up with a very blue looking film, which is what has happened with your latest regrade screencaps. The shots in the desert feel very cold in your regrade now and I don't think that's a good idea because it will create a disconnect with the viewer. They feel very unnatural to me.
I think you should discard the trailer as a colour grading reference because you don't have the colour scheme for the whole film. With your regraded shots in post 95 and 98 you were going in the right direction IMHO, they looked natural and very nice to me. I think my slight adjustments make them look even better but you may or may not agree with that. If you really want a less warm more neutral blueish colour scheme though, similar to the trailer, you should probably use the WOWOW release as a starting point rather than the blu-ray, that has a less warm more neutral feel to it overall and you have the whole film with the whole colour scheme, unlike the trailer where you just have a few scenes. Personally i'd continue using the blu-ray though, it feels more 'right' to me for a film shot in that era, even if it is more heavily graded.
I did not use the trailer as a reference, apart from the bar fight scene. I will come to that later. I used the 35 mm frames as a reference, and then observed that the color scheme I ended up with is very close to the trailer. The only adjustments I made to the origonal color grading is to reduce the dark greens, as the band on Indy's hat was too greenish compared to the photographs of Indy's hat from Raiders.
As far as the 35 mm reference frames go, I'm satisfied, as I noticed the following:
1) In the first frame the chalkboard should be blue, which it is in the regrade.
2) The wall in the second frame is blue/green, and the jacket of the guy nearest to the camera is a yellowish beige. Both of these are true for the regarde, unlike the bluray and WOWOW.
3) In the third frame, the sky should be blue, the sand yellow, and Indy's scarf should be white. Again all these are all correct for the regrade, and not for the bluray and WOWOW.
So, the simple truth is, I tried to match the 35 mm frames, starting from a publicity shot from 1981, and ended up with a color scheme that closely matches the 35 mm trailer in every scene shown, except for the bar fight.
The color scheme for the bar fight was so different from any of the others, that the only logical conclusion was that the scene originally had a different color scheme, at least for the trailer. Since the trailer was from 1983, I believed it to be the color scheme for the 1981 theatrical release as well, and has since been confirmed by hairy_hen, who saw a 35 mm print in 2007. Since there are no other references for this scene, other than the trailer, and publicity photos, which also show that the lighting conditions for this scene were far from the red we see in the home video releases, I used the trailer and publicity photos as a reference.
Publicity photo:
Bluray:
Regrade: