NeverarGreat

Hmm, the blues are somewhat better, though that's making some things such as skin tones and highlights turn that dreaded pink, and it's losing the filmic quality that was so good about the previous version. This is where I usually break out the channel mixer. If you decrease the blue in the red channel while putting that blue into the red channel, and also decrease the green in the green channel while putting that green into the blue channel, it can often give a more filmic look. Here are your latest screenshots with an RGB and Channel Mixer adjustment:

Some things to look for:

The sand in the bottom picture is of relatively uniform color, a yellowish brown with no shifts to pink or green. The greenish tub on the left is now closer to the brown indicated in the 35mm print. The green door in the middle shot is now less saturated as well. Incidentally, it's useful to choose screenshots which have areas of very saturated color in the red, green, and blue channels so that you can see easily if one channel is more dominant than another. In this case, it looks like there was too much information in the green channel and not enough green filling out the blue channel.

These are great settings! Very filmic. The first comparison made me notice a potential issue with your settings that I have had to deal with when making a custom LUT for the Star Wars blu-ray.

In this shot you can see the that the darker areas of the (supposedly neutral) blackboard are indeed neutral, yet the areas where the light is striking it appear yellowish green. The 35mm frame perhaps goes too far, making the entire board blue, but in my opinion the regrade goes too far in the green direction. This was a big problem with Star Wars, and made things which were supposed to be white look green. A good way that I found of making things look filmic was to boost the blues in the highlights while reducing the blues in the shadows, though usually you will want to just aim for neutral highlights.

I guess what threw me was this frame:

The cream colored suit has turned green, and on closer examination seems to have some green artifacts in it. This shot however:

seems to be much closer to normal, though his striped shirt is closer to pink. So it looks like the shots are inconsistent from the outset, and simply correcting both with the same settings isn't going to fix these sorts of problems. If you want a global color fix (as you indicated earlier) then I entirely understand and retract my nitpick. Life is too short for shot by shot color corrections and sanity is a good thing :)

It is a bit red, though now his cream colored suit is shifted green. Perhaps somewhere in between:

JEDIT: Imageshack is turning up the saturation of the image. This is part of why it's so hard to talk about color online. Here's one with less saturation:

Now this is interesting. I noticed in the trailer still, Belloq's tie is quite blue, but so is the balance of the frame. In the other grades and regrades, the tie turns quite green. So I searched for how the tie is supposed to look, and came across this:

Here the tie is clearly gray, whereas the Nazi officer's tie remains quite green. Overall, Belloq's suit seems more balanced here. Just some more data to consider :)

CatBus said:

I guess I should add that while snicker used the RGB channel differences to reconstruct clipped highlights, I think in the Death Star hangar example he uncrushed the blacks by pulling usable detail out of the BTB data, and I'm not sure if you've been making use of what unseen detail is lurking in BTB and WTW.

There is definitely a great deal of data hiding in the superwhites or WTW in Star Wars, and it can be pulled out if you don't clip the detail through a colorspace conversion, but how would it be possible to pull useful data out of the superblacks, since most of the data is random noise within a point or two of RGB 0,0,0?

I think the original 35mm frame is slightly green shifted in the highlights. This is most noticeable in the sky of your predicted frames, which shift oddly to green. Other than that, I really like the look.

Okay, I've done my first color test with the software and the results are quite accurate. FYI though, I had to reverse the order of steps 1 and 2 to get it to work. The biggest problem is that the Blu-ray has such compressed gradients that the color is flattened, and no algorithm can fix that.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as of now this program will only accept separate images, so it's rather awkward to use this for an entire shot, much less a whole scene. So for me it's back to correcting entirely by hand, at least for now ;)

Theorizing here for a minute - Say you match the color of the Star Wars Blu-ray to a source like a 35mm scan or the GOUT, and then the program compares the final result for each frame to that reference source. Any colors that are matched 100% remain, but any colors that don't match, say, because of missing gradients, are then added to the Blu-ray through some sort of color blend mode (which I've done to the Blu-ray using GOUT color in certain places). This would require first registering each frame. Thoughts?

JEDIT - Another idea, instead of cropping the reference and test images, perhaps the program could employ a system of target points that the user can place on the frame and essentially tell the program to correct to those, rather than the entire frame. So details that are important, like C-3PO's gold color, or the skintones, will be weighted more heavily in the correction than other parts.

Regardless, and echoing what others have said, it's an exciting proof of concept and I look forward to seeing where you go with it!

Quick comparison:

1: Blu-ray

2: Blu-ray with predictive colormatching from 16mm source

3: 35mm frame with slight color correction to remove red fading

4: Blu-ray with curves adjustment

While the colormatching algorithm works amazingly well when using identical shots, I'm not sold on its predictive power. In the above example, the predictive shot has crushed and dull highlights, and the blue in the background inexplicably turns to purple.

It's good, but I would have corrected the 16mm source to be less contrasty.

Tobar said:

I didn't see them complaining when the EU overwrote DROIDS which had A-Wings pre-ANH. The Rebellion is a large organization with many different cells. The main fleet is mostly composed of X-Wings. That there are different cells with access to different ships makes sense on a galactic scale. The Battle of Endor saw the gathering of many different cells into one massive fleet to take on the Second Death Star.

If by 'massive fleet' you mean a meager collection of barely military craft such as Blockade Runners, transports, a Medical Frigate and some converted luxury cruise ships along with a handful of fighters, then yes, they did.

;)

DrDre said:

JawsTDS said:

That Tech IB match looks amazing. I would love to see the Blu-ray matched to that, even with the changes. Would you ever consider releasing the Blu-ray rips matched to these sources for the basis for other projects?

That's certainly a nice idea, but it would be a 6 month endeavour to color correct the bluray, and some scenes are impossible to correct without separating the elements. I'm afraid with the projects I've got lined up, it won't happen any time soon. I will be sharing the user interface I've created for color correcting, so maybe someone else would like to do it?

 Color me interested :)

doubleofive said:

Why are we not complaining about this?

http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/11/9309335/see-the-star-wars-scenes-shared-between-the-two-trilogies

Have we lost our vitriol? A video supposedly showing the "like poetry, it rhymes" that could also just prove that "Lazy Lucas, was Lazy" is making the rounds, "proving" that the PT was "reverent" to the OT because the director only has so many ways he can shoot a medium/closeup scene.

Why would we complain? I thought the music in the video was quite relaxing, and it did a good job of juxtaposing similar shots from the different trilogies. Is it usually lazy filmmaking? Yes. Could it ALSO be poetic? Absolutely.

As much as I like picking apart the problems of the prequels, it is not a vitriolic exercise for me, and hatred isn't going to bring anyone around to my side. Enthusiasm for what I DO enjoy just might.

^^Well that does look a lot better!

DrDre said:

 Those last frames look spectacular!

I think this method will be the way to go when doing color corrections of the Blu-ray, as it automates what would be (and was) hours and hours of work trying to rescue these shots using manual color correction. There will still be problems with the Blu-ray that need to be corrected by hand of course, such as R2's dome in the above shot, which is oddly green with purple panels. That's just the nature of the blu-ray, that some shots are missing color channels and gradients and nothing can be done to fix that without pulling in color information from another source.

Zyrother said:

NeverarGreat said:

My download inevitably fails after the first 300MB or so, and has for every large file I've tried to download from Google Drive. Have you considered uploading to Mega? Those downloads seem to work for me at least.

 May want to try another browser. Chrome always works for me. Firefox should have no trouble either.

I always use Firefox, haven't tried Chrome yet. Though I think it may just be an internet connection problem on my end.

My download inevitably fails after the first 300MB or so, and has for every large file I've tried to download from Google Drive. Have you considered uploading to Mega? Those downloads seem to work for me at least.

That's really cool. The only thing that irks me is Ford's hammy expression as everyone else gazes stoically into the distance.

Also: 200 pages of randomness!

How are you dealing with the luminosity of the blu-ray? I noticed that the last group of three comparisons darkened the blu-ray even more, while the r2 frame brightened it.

These look wonderful, though still a bit on the green side.

The true genesis for that name (which I just made up upon seeing this thread) is that someone on an outer rim world asks Obi-wan who he thinks he is, dressing up like a Jedi, asking if he really wants to be associated with that group of has-beens. He asks who Obi-wan is again, seriously. Obi-wan retorts: 'a has-been', and the guy asks if he could call him 'Ben' for short.

That will do nicely, I think.

They look pretty good, though the golds tend to shift to green. That's probably since there's no gold reference in the shot of leia and stormtroopers. Is it possible to build a color profile with this program using multiple reference frames so that the results are similar to a LUT?

Not that it makes any difference, but if they were going for a villain on each Blu-ray cover, it should have gone:

Maul

Dooku

Grevious

Tarkin

Vader

Emperor

Boba Fett had even less of a role than Grevious in Empire, so it doesn't make any sense to put him on the cover. (If you did, however, you should put him on Empire then replace Grevious with Vader)

EyeShotFirst said:

If I liked the artist before I found out who they really are, I can still like their art. If I found out the artist was a piece of shit before I discovered there art, I can never look at their art in a good light.

If I had seen this painting not didn't know who the artist was, I would say it's very nice and well done... But knowing it's Hitler, I can't appreciate it.

Using anything Holocaust related as an example is a little far reaching, but rape is torture.

 That is actually quite well rendered. I never thought to look at Hitler's art before.

This was also by Hitler, and I actually really like it. Does that make me genocidal? The world is filled with people who do terrible things, and some of these same people also do good things. Hitler's art doesn't redeem his atrocious acts, certainly, but I can certainly appreciate his few good ones.

It's funny to imagine Yoda in that picture thinking the words in your user title :)