Dreamaster

Saw this thread and downloaded the preservation last night. There was a couple of things that surprised me:

All of that “color noise” that’s on several of the prints that the various teams have scanned wasn’t noticeable on both the ship flyover of Tatooine and during the sandy scenes.

The color on the first half the film seemed really good/natural… but on the second half/death star scenes there seemed to be quite a lot of red push. Neverargreat’s last preview video lays WASTE to it.

It brought back good memories. Empire Strikes back was one of the first movies I saw in a theater… So until 1997, TV/VHS full screen is the only way I’d ever seen Star Wars.

If you read Dr. Dre’s thread from the very beginning, he started out doing something exactly like that.
http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Star-Wars-Trilogy-SE-bluray-color-regrade/id/48327

Eventually though he created a color tool that sort of “auto corrects” faded photos (and print scans) and had a lot of success further getting the colors “close to the original print.” In parallel with the work he was doing, Towne32 did his own color correction of Harmy’s 2.5… and also in parallel, Neverargreat has been doing his own color correction of the blu ray.

If you look at all of those screenshots and versions you can kind of tell (IN MY OPINION) that they had influence on each other’s work and that the colors while different, are definitely converging. I think the last “big debate” seemed to be on how dark Tarkin’s skin was. 😃 I think in essence there is more consensus now than when they all started 2-4 years ago, and Neverargreat has dropped a few samples of the shot by shot correction he’s done and they are simply MIND BLOWING. If we understand it right, Harmy’s 3.0 will incorporate his changes and it will be fantastic.

(Last page of Neverargreat’s thread that has the samples😃
http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Neverars-1080p-Star-Wars-Color-Correction/id/16256/page/7

So in summation, “I think we’re almost there.”

towne32 said:

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

I really don’t understand what’s awkward about it.

The idea is that the more Disney/Lucasfilm discusses a new OOT release, the more they will have to publicly discuss George’s wishes regarding that mess, what is/isn’t canon. The ways in which they could promote the OOT are a bit of a diss to the later versions.

LOL, but we know that’s pretty silly… After handing Lucas 4 billion bucks and then him turning around and saying “I sold my children to the slavers” I don’t think they have much interest in his wishes anymore!

4k Theatrical Edition. Doesn’t get much simpler.

Darth Lucas said:

Ok guys, here is attempt #2. This time I utilized a technique Mike Verta demonstrated in one of his videos to help get rid of some color noise, which helped immensely with getting the color better. I still don’t think it’s perfect, but an improvement nonetheless.

Did no one else catch this? Who’s volunteering to hold down Darth Lucas and make him clean up all the yellow color noise in the Tatooine desert scenes of 1.6? 😃

Williarob the new crawl is really cool, looks great. Last night I ran old and new side by side, it’s a neat comparison.

Darth Lucas said:

Dreamaster said:

As a last resort couldn’t the planets be rotoscoped from a different source?

Yes but I think the idea is to have it all from one source.

Heck… now that I’m looking at it… you could rotoscope it from it’s own source, pre color corrected planet placed on top of post color correction (that fixes the ships), planet. Still a last resort thing though, I know that’s a lot of work.

As a last resort couldn’t the planets be rotoscoped from a different source?

dark_jedi said:

Dreamaster said:

So Dr. Dre… no more screenshots now that you’re on Team Blu? 😃

I am not DrDre but I am sure he will still post some great screens for us to look at and keep improving this wonderful tool, but a lot of us are really busy at the moment and we have a lot of great SW Trilogy stuff to line up.

Whew! Well it’s good to know “Ahsoka” that you didn’t use any of that dark Jedi powers on him! I was skeered!

So Dr. Dre… no more screenshots now that you’re on Team Blu? 😃

You_Too said:

The GOUT subs has the crawl in all the languages so I bet it could be synched into these as well as the Vader and Emperor talk in ESB and removing the abominable “Wesa free!” at the end of ROTJ if it’s in the subs. If there are any other differences I forgot please inform us. 😃

Jesus Christ! Please tell me you’re joking and that’s not really in Jedi…

Williarob said:

For reasons none of us understand, he doesn’t want it on the Spleen, however, he has no objections to it being posted anywhere else. So, just post it somewhere else.

In the meantime, I updated the cover to use the xwings from the SSE:

Aspect Ration? Is the ‘n’ correct?

towne32 said:

It’s so funny. “I have nothing to do with this.” “Also, I’ll have it taken down”. “Also, Rogue 1 is negative 1” “Also, rogue 1 has nothing to do with this account” “also, I’m someone you’ve never heard of who isn’t involved but has final say but isn’t negative 1 but somehow I’m on his personal account”. It’s self parody at this point.

Aye, that was one of the most confusing comments I’ve ever read in my life!!!

yoda-sama said:

Blurring the line, as you’ve been doing, between new user and troll is what mocks new users and erodes our willingness to help in general. Just hang out and chat with actual sentences, and leave the humor to Frink and the rest for a while till you see how things generally work here, and you might find that you can have a good time without pissing everyone off by confusing the Hell out of them.

OMG! It’s funny reading all these brutal comments and I’m thinking “There’s a whole different set of rules for Frink!?” You actually came right out and admitted it. This has become one of my least favorite communities. You all treat each other like crap, but especially new users. And I apologize for opening my mouth and continuing this in your thread Harmy… but that one just lit me up.

ray_afraid said:

Dat_SW_Guy said:

drifiting a bit off-topic, you can actually see David Prowse behind the Darth Vader (like you already know 😐) just a little thing I spotted while watching 2.7.
(NTSC DVD5 version)
increased brightness and contrast

I’ve seen this brought up in other places. Are people pointing this out as a mistake in the film?
There is supposed to be a guy in there ya know…
It’s Mannequin Skyguy!

Completely agreed… I’ve never understood the issue either. It would only make sense to me if Vader was a full on robot/android.

NeverarGreat said:

This is one of the last scenes of this half of the film I haven’t finalized yet, but here’s something close to final:

Luke Leia Han

Descpecialized 3.0 is going to be REALLY awesome!

NeverarGreat said:

This is one of those shots where the true color of the shot simply doesn’t exist in the Blu-ray. Note the magenta of the cup on the left, which is supposed to be white, still retains a magenta hue in the correction. Similarly, Luke’s dusty offwhite shirt has too much green in the highlights and too much magenta in the shadows, and the correction still doesn’t completely remove these inaccuracies.

This picture skews red but still shows how Luke’s shirt is definitely not white like Leia’s gown:

OK… so a bit of a HA HA here… I was about to post this screenshot and politely explain to the author of this post how I used one of this forum’s most awesome member’s LUTs as a base and then further tweaked the colors in Premiere for my personal “1 pass correction” of the blu ray… That member being NeverarGreat of course!! (No wonder I have trouble making friends!)

I can’t seem to find that exact scene from the photo you posted in the film but this one is closest I could find. It would be cool to show us how close you’ve gotten to the photo in your recoloring of the shot NeverarGreat, even if those missing colors aren’t going to show up. 😃

g-force said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre - you sir are a master. That is it. Perfection.

Thanks, I like them a lot also!

Good idea for another source to use! but… Some look a bit blue, some too bright, some with a lack of contrast. Not loving them I gotta say.

Do the same for the JSC, and the LPP, and the IB, and this one, throw out the outliers, average the results, and then you may have something.

-G

Trying to get where you’re coming from… this is the only one that might look “too blue” to my eyes

but one could argue that’s an “early morning shot with overcast skies” 😃

I disagree about the contrast, I think the contrast looks pretty good… maybe increase it just a TAD… but really I think where these colors get off the quickest has been in too low of brightness in a lot of these releases making the saturation appear overdone. I think these being a bit “flatter” is a big part of why the skin tones look so natural.

Though… Luke WAS wearing a LOT of makeup for the film… and that’s another reason (in my humble opinion) why there’s been some skin tone struggles there as well.

DrDre said:

I’ve been experimenting a bit with color balancing the telecines of the 1997 SE, to see what colors come out of this process. Here are some results:

/tons of screenshots with ultra natural skin tones

SOLD. Can those shots be used to correct the blu ray to those colors then?

Stinky-Dinkins said:

yoda-sama said:

I don’t agree with Rey being Luke’s daughter, we should fix Luke.

They could do the same thing I did with my dog, trick him into the car by jiggling the keys and asking him if he wants to go to the park, then driving him straight to the vet. They should have Admiral Ackbar do that in the next movie.

“It’s a trap!”

Darth Lucas said:

I agree that we shouldn’t be reliant on production photos, and by no means should we be correcting to match them, but they’re far from useless.

Average out the colors of three production photos from the same location or set and you get a much better understanding of what the color should be. Two of the production photos have a blueish wall and the other has a grey one? Well then assuming there’s no obvious tint to the photo, the wall should probably lean toward blue. You know? Don’t match the photos, but use them to better understand the color of sets and objects. We aren’t all Mike Verta with the luxury of physically looking at these props. Production photos are the next best thing.

I agree I don’t really understand the line of thinking that automatically throws away the only sources that haven’t faded. If we had really started this from scratch I’d even not be afraid to use stills from the original toyline 21 backs. Really though between Dr. Dre, Poita’s, Willrob, and Nevergreat’s work I feel like the “colors” is just about in the bag finally.

Some people fantasize about buying huge houses if they were rich… if I were rich I’d get all those guys together in the same room so everything would get knocked out in a day. 😃

DrDre said:

The Owen/Luke/C-3PO frame is slightly green shifted, because the reel was corrected with a global correction model. When I balance the frame individually using the algorithm, and then perform a gamma correction, I get a result very similar to Dreamaster’s manual correction:

Aye, roads are converging now.

After gamma correction:

Here is one of your corrections to the Blu Ray in February which isn’t too far off from this either. Looking over that thread you were working more from that photograph above as inspiration and it kept leading you to over-saturate the corrections later on. And now we’ve seen a version of Jedi that has more neutral sand as well, we can be more confident that the sand wasn’t super orange originally.

DrDre said:

Here I reduced the yellow somewhat in the Owen shot:

Still on the whole a lot of those “final” blu ray correction shots are/were phenomenal even before this thread. 😃 I’m confident you now have enough data to knock the first half of the blu ray out of the park! (Almost time to move onto the second half??)

UnitéD2 said:

The same image minus the saturation adjustment :

Better! A bit “orange” to my eyes but if we’re going to tint SW, peach or orange is definitely better than blue, or magenta.

This is my take on that scene that I created by using avidemux to recolor the silver screen edition, using a “less contrasty” version of Dr. Dre’s correction as a visual base.

I made a thread on how I did it if you want to try it yourself… it’s become one of my favorite ways to watch the movie now when I’m not needing the clarity of Towne/Harmy’s 2.7.
http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Improving-Silver-Screen-Edition-colors-on-the-cheap/id/49565

pittrek said:

That’s why I wrote it FEELS perfect and not LOOKS perfect 😃 What I meant was it feels like it was shot on a hot desert planet.

GOTCHA… Your bases were fully covered by good grammar. 😃

To really run this “into the ground” though I did some experimentation.

I took Towne’s 2.7 and PUMPED up the saturation in VLC as well as a slight contrast boost:
Look at how close it is to the IB photo:

And simply for reference, here is Towne’s version with no image filtering:

What does that tell or teach us? In shows us how the RED/GREEN/BLUE levels can be spot on but there can still be tremendous differences visually because of how much Brightness, Contrast, and Saturation can effect the image.

darthrush said:

pittrek said:

DrDre said:

Yes, I noticed it too. The reality is, that any color balancing algorithm uses some criterium to balance the colors. Mine is no different. The second reel has a lot of red/orange in almost every shot, and almost no green, meaning that the colors are pretty biased, and therefore unbalanced:

It’s very difficult to find shots with sufficient amounts of red, green, and blue to calibrate the algorithm. I’m trying to figure out a way around this, but this is a bit of a challenge. The current algorithm is less sensitive to this problem, but as these shots show, apparently still too sensitive.

Am I the only one who thinks this image FEELS perfect? 😃

+1 😉

I don’t really think it’s “perfect”, 3PO is awefully orange in it. That said, because of you guys I made my own coloration of Star Wars blu ray with a high orange push and it looks a lot like this. Maybe I’ll post some screenshots of it in my thread on the freebie improvements I did on the Silverscreen edition.

towne32 said:

Thanks for sharing the HDTV II on myspleen. Would definitely be interested in the other SkyHD caps of the other films, though I realize they might need to be shared via a non-spleen method.

OMG YES that wasn’t there when I posted this morning! Thank you so much!