Dreamaster

DrDre said:

Nope, I borrowed this color grading from Mike Verta. I trust his judgement 😃.

Thank God! He’s green!

towne32 said:

I like the newest set.

Agreed… it gets rid of most of the green in Tarkin’s face/cheek area.

DrDre said:

Dreamaster said:
DrDre, this shot “slightly green-shifted” is making the walls a more cyan/blue color. I really do think this one is really close. Still curious to see how that LUT applied to some other death star scenes would look (like a Tarkin scene, or Obi-Wan deactivating the tractor beam)

I’m thinking how to incorporate Harmy’s and Mike Verta’s input into a reasonably accurate grading. We’ll get there…

😃 OK I’ll be patient. I think I also figured out what I wanted to say about Tattooine gradings the other day, so I’m glad you posted another “final” of that scene. 😉 This one looks like you’re already thinking of it but a few of the latter ones seemed to white balance as if the lighting was something more akin to florescent lights, whereas all of these scenes need to have a warmer “sunlit” white balance (tending gently towards yellow or orange). I make game environments/terrian and I’m always setting the mood by changing the color of the directional light (the sun basically)… That’s the point of white balance, which does NOT effect the primary colors so much as the very lightest colors. The specular highlights in Tattooine should never really have a green or a blue tinge but that’s the common mistake I’ve seen in a lot of the other colorings done to the movie. (Looking at people’s skin, not talking about the specular highlights on R2’s blue dome or something, LOL) In the Death Star shots, that’s a COMPETELY different story because there are actually green lights on some of the walls and the lights really ARE in fact more florescent in nature. In fact, in Empire I noted that in the Hoth base the lights actually were set up to alternate between white and blue as Han and Leia are arguing down the hall! But Tattooine, I just wanted us to keep that warmth in mind. And again, that really shouldn’t effect much of the “red/peach” in people’s faces, but it will very much effect the whites on the astromech droids and the oily highlights in the skin. I think it will also effect the color of the sand a bit. Death Star Shots you’ll have to really look at the different sources to figure out which direction to push the highlights based on what color you think the lights are that they are closest too.

P.S. All of your tatooine finals on the first page look perfect BTW… Verta’s on the other hand might lean a bit green still in darker shades of that speeder though! 😃

Dreamaster said:

DrDre said:

DeEd 2.5 is definitely more green than the print scans, which are themselves green sifted, so my guess would be that there should be a slight green shift, like this:

WOW… that looks awesome… definitely gets some of the excess reds out. Now can you apply that LUT to a Tarkin scene just to see what that does? That might give us another counter reference even though I know part of the problem is inconsistent grading on the blu ray.

DrDre, this shot “slightly green-shifted” is making the walls a more cyan/blue color. I really do think this one is really close. Still curious to see how that LUT applied to some other death star scenes would look (like a Tarkin scene, or Obi-Wan deactivating the tractor beam)

DrDre said:

DeEd 2.5 is definitely more green than the print scans, which are themselves green sifted, so my guess would be that there should be a slight green shift, like this:

WOW… that looks awesome… definitely gets some of the excess reds out. Now can you apply that LUT to a Tarkin scene just to see what that does? That might give us another counter reference even though I know part of the problem is inconsistent grading on the blu ray.

DrDre said:

Here’s another shot regraded using the new references:

My heart is leaping with joy!

Pretty photo. 😃

DrDre said:

Having re-examined my reference materials, I’ve concluded there’s something wrong with the Tarkin/Motti color grading. The Tarkin frame for example looked like this:

…and should look closer to this (preliminary):

Just thinking out loud:
You’re trying to get some of the “warmth” back (which is good)… When I look at a lot of these correction threads I see very similar results… pulling the blue/magenta out of the blu ray gets us something a bit cold and when white balanced tends to push towards greens in some of the highlights. Looking at photos like this though and the Tech-Preview I see a lot more “peach” in the skin tones that seems to be really hard to get at from the blu ray. It almost feels like the film should have a mild orange/yellow push in it’s grading which looks more in line with some of your 70mm regraded shots before you white balance them.

Love this final!!!

Memorex said:

DrDre said:

pittrek said:

The diner scenes look great, the 3PO shot still looks a bit too green.

It needs a bit of fine tuning, but I think this is much better:

Beautiful!

I like this one a lot better than the one you decided was final. It doesn’t have that “green” feeling your final has, especially near the bottom of C3PO and the “yellow” splotches on the sandcrawler. Here those splotches look like a natural part of aged and rusty metal in sand.

DrDre said:

Here’s a regraded shot of one of the great Star Wars villains.

Bluray regraded:

I’m in agreement that the brightness can come up a hair to reveal more detail in Vader but I think the colors are spot on. His face isn’t suffering from the “Tarkin green splotches” I’ve seen, and the uniform looks like the right shade of green.

Be careful looks like there were even different shades of the uniforms.

towne32 said:

clutchins said:

Towne, when you were talking about the 1997 files did you mean to say you’re creating an update to the Respecialized '97 Edition based on your 2.6/7 Edition? I usually lurk these threads a couple of times a day to stay abreast of things but I haven’t checked them since I went out of town this weekend.

No such plans. But the current release has no black bars I think and must be reencoded to burn to BD.

Man I learned this the hard way with a different film last night!! The resolution has to be in standard HD resolutions or the Playstation 3 won’t play the video portion of the film, just the audio. 1920x1080 or 1280x720!

NeverarGreat said:

dlvh said:

NeverarGreat said:

“I’ve finished this scene in my version, and the yellow is actually gone from entire shots (if you notice, the flowers in the lower left are supposed to be yellow as well). It’s a problem with hundreds of shots of the blu-ray, which means that I’ve had to pull these colors from other sources since they simply no longer exist in the blu-ray.”

And what did your shots of this scene look like, my we see?

Sure:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/164143/picture:1

Screenshot Comparison has recently been increasing image saturation for some reason. I also may give it another look since Silver Screen was made available after I finished this scene.

Jedit: Now two comparisons at link

Photobucket seems to increase the saturation as well. Ah well, you get the idea.

Those are really nice NeverarGreat!

Harmy said:

You’ll be happy to hear I am dialing down the blue in the Wampa scene for v2.5, but nowhere near to the level of the Grindhouse, which is at least as far from a trustworthy color reference as the official BD. I already have the new Wampa scene nearly done, so stay tuned for some samples in my own thread - sorry about hijacking yours, Puggo but I didn’t start it 😉

YAY!!!
/fist bump, high fives and a man hug

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

Dreamaster said:

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:
I can’t imagine George Lucas adding blue tint for a 16mm film.

Or for the entirety of the DVD/Blu Ray releases of A New Hope…
SO SORRY, you left yourself wide open there! 😉

I disagree… it makes complete sense to regrade the color for a digital release of a film. It’s standard practice and the tools make it easy. But 16mm film releases were such a tiny market, and they were in a sort of in a “grey area” - it’s not even clear they were done legally nor by a related studio. It’s doubtful that Lucas had any involvement in the 16mm films at all, and I doubt have spent any of his own money on them. It’s apples and oranges.

I almost don’t know how to respond to this, except to say you’ve almost unintentionally strengthened the argument that Puggo Strikes Back shouldn’t be seen as a defacto reference for color in Empire Strikes Back… though… that actually might be your point? 😃

CatBus said:

Is desperately trying to avoid revisionism in one of the few places there isn’t any. Proceeds to call it A New Hope. Sigh.

BWA HA HA HA HA! Touche.

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

I can’t imagine George Lucas adding blue tint for a 16mm film.

Or for the entirety of the DVD/Blu Ray releases of A New Hope…

SO SORRY, you left yourself wide open there! 😉

Harmy said:

Oh, yeah, most old home video releases were undersatured with unnaturally boosted reds.
As for Grindhouse, the point there is that the print was faded and so it had to go through color correction and they had no good reference, so they had to do it by eye and just decided to make snow white, which all evidence points to that it wasn’t in the original ESB prints.
Also, when a snowy landscape is dark, it does usually appear bluish, even in real life.

Interesting photo, which almost leaves it just as unresolved because it does show some blue lighting but the main carcass snow is perfectly white:
http://dimmerlightstudios.com/screens_med/tfu/e5s_bts_48_r.jpg

I respect your decision sir, I had to at least try! 😉

Harmy said:

Based on what do you figure the blue was added later? The terribly under-saturated laserdisc, or the faded Grindhouse print, which has terrible colors with magenta shadows and green highlights? Or, and this is the least trustworthy of those three super untrustworthy options, your memory from when you were 5 years old?

Towne replied and let me know I’m apparently beating a dead horse (didn’t know this was already a “thang” sorry!)… but I will answer your question since you posed it too me and to do so as intelligently as possible…

Snow and ice… are white. We know this, start there (but of course as they are both highly reflective and thus easily influenced by colored lighting but… now from the laserdisc, which you describe as under-saturated… I agree with that, but looking at Luke’s face hanging upside down in the cave… it’s a good flesh tone… the specular highlights in his face and the yellows in his uniform lets us know there’s plenty of color information in the shot. So if the shot had been made with blue lights, and then the scene desaturated so that the blue disappeared into white, it’s highly unlikely that his face and uniform wouldn’t have been affected in a very unnatural way. Now travelling to the Grindhouse print… again, yes the primary’s are somewhat off… but the snow shows the magenta tones of the faded print. Again… were those snow shots originally not only blue, but a deep blue, the magenta push would made those probably more purplish than simply a gentle magenta hue that’s left (from the obvious pullback color correction since the actual film makes it look absolutely rose colored). And again, the skin tones are “reasonable” to lend that I highly doubt that the blue faded in such a way that when colors were corrected it suddenly went to almost white.

Thing is… I “get” why Lucas changed it. The sun was setting in addition to the snow storm hitting hard (in the story)… Puggo’s film gives it a more “night time” appearance that I think they were going for when they graded that in. There might have also been the artistic choice to make it bluer so that it looks more “alien” to separate Hoth from “Earth”.

But to me in the cave scene, the blue is strong even on Luke’s skin. It doesn’t “feel natural” when I see it.

Thanks for listening. 😃

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

Dreamaster said:
Puggo I’m sure you’ve already been asked this, but did you do color corrections to the Puggo Strikes Back or is this pretty much true to the print? Trying to figure out if all that blue hue in the wampa cave was added in or if it was really like that on the film.

Color correction was done by Adywan.

With regards your question - “is this pretty much true to the print?”, it is important to understand the issues involved in capturing film. The film image is captured by a digital camera, for which a decision has to be made with respect to white-balance (among others). It’s not just a matter of grabbing what is there verbatim - the media are entirely different. Digital capture involves lighting, and ultimately a color model, and there are always decisions made at every step, and adjustments. It’s the same with printing a film, and projecting it. We will never know the exact, correct color, because there is always variation. I tried to capture it as close as I could based on my own eyes, and then had Ady correct it because I liked his color choices in earlier projects.

As for the Wampa scene - to my eyes it looked that blue on the film. Surprised me too.

(note this discussion really belongs in the PSB thread)

Sorry, I did not know this thread existed when I asked. 😃 Empire was the first movie I saw on the big screen when I was 5 years old. I remember that scene because it freaked me out! I don’t remember a blue hue… and then I had Empire on video tape and I didn’t remember it there either… sure enough a few days ago after watching Harmy’s Empire 2.0 (which is what made me originally go WHA?? on that scene) I downloaded the PUGGO Strikes Back, a laserdisc trilogy restoration, and the grindhouse Empire release from TeamNegative (CAN YOU SAY GLUTTONY??? OH MY GOD!!!) and I discovered that the grindhouse and the laserdisc didn’t have any blue, but yours does, and it looks like on Harmy’s FB page shows that the GOUT also has the blue tint.

So at some point… that blue got added in “officially” at Lucasfilm. But it kind of makes me a sad panda because I doubt I’ll be able to talk Harmy into dialing that back for Empire 3.0. LOL

Thanks for replying I really appreciated it!

I think those 3 tatooine shots are phenominal. I THINK what is happening is our eyes have never, EVER seen those shots cleaned up of all the “color grain”… Mike talks about it in one of his Legacy vidoes… there’s “film grain” and then there’s the yellow junk that’s in the Tatooine desert scenes that just really makes them noisy. When Dr. Dre filtered out the purple noise (probably used to be the yellow noise before the God aweful blu ray color grading), I think he was actually getting that excess color grain out of the image. Sure he might pull back the green hue just a touch but they are actually REALLY close, more to how they looked in “real life” versus anything we’ve ever seen on the screen before.

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

I never made covers. Seen some cool-looking ones, though.

Puggo I’m sure you’ve already been asked this, but did you do color corrections to the Puggo Strikes Back or is this pretty much true to the print? Trying to figure out if all that blue hue in the wampa cave was added in or if it was really like that on the film.

towne32 said:

dlvh said:

I think most of your edited images in recent posts, look good DrDre. However, I thought this one of Obi-Wan, looked like his cloak had a bit too much green in it, so I adjusted that, and I upped the saturation just a bit.

The original:

opinions?

I’m currently only on a semi-calibrated monitor. But I thought the cloak looked okay before and your change has brought some reds into the shadows and face that don’t look quite right.

In fact, given Dre’s previous comment about R2 (which I agree with), your calibration might be a bit on the cool side, masking some of these pink effects (and increasing the greens you’re seeing)?

Agreed… dlvh, your redo gives obi-wan a kind of “hot orange” face on my monitor.

Harmy said:

Well, I’m hoping to use Dre’s tool to match the Grindhouse to my colorgrading, if I can actually get it to work.
And I think I will probably replace whole shots in the Hoth battle - most of them are fast moving shots with lots of motion blur, so there’s usually very little detail to be gained from combining with the BD shots.

I know you’ve said you’re not going to change the color timings much but please consider pulling back the blue push, especially in the wampa cave, and the following scenes with obi-ghost and han rescue.