You_Too

Ok here comes my first feedback on the WP. I've only finished watching until the scene of R2 and C3PO on Tatooine begins, and I'll point out the stuff I noticed so far, be them correct or not.

Now I'm a bit too lazy to make thumb codes of all images so I'm posting a link to the gallery that was created on imageshack: http://imageshack.us/g/803/001wz.png/

Ok, first 2 shots show a color inconsistency, the picture looking more yellow in the second one, easy to see if comparing the floor, walls or 3PO.

3-4 show the same using another shot.

Shot 5-6 shows two frames after each other, where the image suddenly changes and gets darker in that scene.

7-10 shows some color and white-level changes in those shots. Look at the white wall of the hallway in the back for example, or the brightest parts of 3PO.

11-13 shows some changes between shots of Leia.
In 11 it looks balanced.
In 12 the black level is raised so black looks dark grey instead.
In 13 the black level is correct again, but the white level is lowered and gives the image an underexposed look.

In shot 14, is it just me or does Leia's lips look a bit brown-ish? I don't know what exact color they should be there, but either way, look at the guns in the background looking slightly "dark brown".

Compared to 15 where the guns look dark grey/black. Also in shot 15, look at the glove at the bottom left. The cyan shadows thing again, which happened to Han's boot in the Greedo scene earlier?

In shot 16 the shadows are dark blue instead.

In 17 the shadows have changed to a more neutral tone, and the skintones have also changed compared to 16.

Ok, that's it for now. We'll see if I'll find more in other scenes tomorrow.

EDIT: After comparing some shots to my render, it seems some of the differences between 7 and 8 was there in the render, and shot 13 was underexposed even there.

Well Wavey, I think if I make a tutorial on color correction I'll probably make it more about how to use curves, what to do and what not to do.

When I made my settings for Star Wars, I took lots of screenshots from the movie and pasted them all inside one big image, then I checked what came out when I let photoshop auto-find the RGB mid-curves, and since it seemed to balance the colors more right, I stuck with it and just added my own gamma curve to make the picture brighter and dig up some shadow detail.

Then of course there was the selective color settings, but that's for another tutorial... :)

So anyway, basically I'm saying the tutorial won't be about how I did the Star Wars correction since that was partly done by photoshop. I think I'll do it a bit more about how to make those adjustments yourself, either using some source as reference to match another image to, or how to simply know what to do with an image to get more balanced colors.

I'm interested as well... Of course!

Interesting! I gotta try this some time. I remember playing this on the original arcade machine back in the day.

Omen, about the clip you posted, I think the difference is not very noticeable unless one looks at the screenshots you posted. (Why are the screenshots in 2560x1600 btw?)

The small difference that is there is probably a step in the right direction though.

Ah, thanks Harmy! I guess we have to move that discussion over there.

timdiggerm said:

Doesn't the Hobbiton example demonstrate that a constant green was not accidentally cast over the entire film, but instead that whatever differences exist were intentional?

Based on having analyzed lots of frames from the movie by color samples and comparing, I'm almost sure they first made a re-grading of each scene and some overall color changes, then the green cast got added on top of it.

For example, aside from the green cast there's a lot of parts where grey and green colors from the theatrical are instead blue or cyan. Some blue colors are darker overall, and some green colors have been shifted a bit more towards cyan, making for example forest trees look neon-like. Some red here and there have also been shifted towards yellow.

Funny how we are so off-topic here, sorry! :)

Your spreadsheet thread is great, it's something that can be very useful for various projects.

Personally I won't attempt such a big project as a shot-by-shot correction though, the reason being I'm too impatient for such a thing. That's why I made this thread to help find a good basic overall correction, to take the first step to a better looking movie, then others can take the next. :)

Thanks Funcha!

Every single scene would probably need tweaking on it's own if you want it to be perfect, but then again, the only way to know what's the completely correct look for each scene would be to watch an original technicolor print.

If you use my settings for a render, think about how much better it looks than the raw blu-ray, at least!

Or you can wait for Harmy to finish his Star Wars despecialized v2.0 since it's based on a couple renders from me, with additional adjustments made to each scene. Not to mention how amazing work Harmy has done on removing the CGI stuff.

About ESB and ROTJ, we'll see. I'm currently taking a little break from it. I'm at least planning to make some kind of video tutorial on basic color correction using curves. We'll see when that happens too.

Yeah I would've recolored Hobbiton and everything separately if I had done a real restoration project on it. What I did was a bit like my Star Wars project, that I tried to find the best overall settings for the whole thing. I won't upload it at least now, actually first I only made it as a guide to help people to do it themselves, since it's a huge upload and I don't have good upload speed. We'll see what happens if I do another take on it in the future.

I haven't seen your ESB clip yet but I'll check it later.

OMEN!-_-! said:

Funny that you mention the abomination that is the green tinted Fellowship of the Ring extended edition blu-ray. I have recently created a regraded version of the fellowship of the ring blu-ray that has the green tint removed and has been brightened as well because the blu-ray is very dark compared to the theatrical blu-ray and dvds. That and regrading The Two Towers and Return of the King to remove the not so obvious teal tint running through them was my last project before I started this one. :)

Here's a comparison between the blu-ray and my final regraded version:

Blu-ray: http://img805.imageshack.us/img805/5954/fotrbluray.jpg

Regraded version: http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/6972/fotrregraded.jpg

How they could release that fellowship of the ring ee blu-ray as it is when the snow so blatently looks green and there is no remaining white in the entire film due to the strong green tint throughout the film is beyond me...

Interesting! Especially since I did a regrade myself on that one. Before registering here I created a little blog site about it, check it out: http://fotrfix.blog.com/

Now that I have more tools, like selective color for avisynth, I'd be able to correct that movie even more sometime maybe.

Sorry for off-topic talk!

That 35mm image looks very interesting indeed.

Omen, make sure you check out the ESB shots on this site: http://www.jedi1.net/
They all have their own tint and stuff, but could also give you clues on how the movie should look.

OMEN!-_-! said:

Nice regrading there You_Too! It's like a lighter version of Harmy's screencap. The thing is, to me, just like with Harmy's version, the flesh tone is too 'normal' in this particular scene IMHO. I don't know how reliable the GOUT is as a source of regrading, but luke's warm flesh tones don't seem to fit with the extremely cold environment he's in. The whole scene just looks a little too warm and reddish IMO.

That's of course like you say, a taste-thing too. I just wanted to show how photoshop would balance the colors in that shot. If aiming for a neutral look, it can sometimes prove useful to do it that way. I, like you, understand though that they wanted it to look more "cold". Personally I'd prefer the original version, whatever that looks like! haha

OMEN!-_-! said:

The original theatrical fellowship of the ring colour palette comes to mind as an example of this later type of grading, where many locations feel different due to having their own unique colour grading.

Don't get me started on it! :)

I love the grading of all three Lord of the rings movies, but I get totally sick of the thought of how they could mess up Fellowship's extended blu-ray release. It had a green tint over the whole movie, especially provable by taking a color sample of the brightest whites, which had more green in them than red and blue. There were lots of other color errors in it as well.

Otherwise I love the idea of using color grading in new movies to make different scenes feel the way the director wants.

This is what came out when I took that shot into photoshop and let it auto-find the RGB mid-levels and adjusted it to that without changing the white or black balance:

Good news about the harddrive! Hope everything will work fine now, and that Adobe's software won't be so picky.

Oh, well mine are not factory pressed but copies. And I'll be sharing it as the mpg files, not disc images, so if you want to seed you have to rename the dat files to what they're called in the torrent.

Moth3r said:

I'm pretty sure that none would be interested (see here). The 'Z' version appears to have been posted to the newsgroup back in June, but apparently was missing CD 1.

none pm'd me and linked that thread as well. I couldn't send a pm back though since it said his inbox is full.

So anyway, I'll put this on myspleen sometime soon.

Thanks a lot dark_jedi! Like I told you in the pm, I would like to make a video tutorial on the basics of color correction sometime. If and when I manage to do it I'll probably put it in this thread.

First of all, I wanna say I don't know much about the difference between the theatrical version and the DVD, HDTV etc. It's just that when I saw this thread I remembered a couple very old discs I had, which I managed to dig up, and it's 2 Video-CD's of TPM shot with a camera in a cinema.

When checking the properties of the video files, the creation date of part 2 is May 22, 1999. That's probably around the time when I got those discs.

I don't know if they're interesting to anyone since it's low resolution and all that, but here are some screens:

Personally, I'm ready to throw this in the trash but if some completionist out there wants it, I could put it on myspleen or something.

bkev said:

I'd be interested in seeing if You_Too could work up a good color correction for the Swedish print's release.

Here's a quick take on what could be done to that one. (Using a shot from Puggo's website since I had to delete that version after watching it because of needing some free space)

I wouldn't hope for a big color correction on this one though. The other one has much more color information to dig up from the picture.

ww12345 said:

If it is just the file size limitations of FAT, you could always format the hard drive to NTSC.

You must mean NTFS.

Harmy said:

I would personally lose the rounded sides as well

I think one should be able to warp the image to straighten it out, using the Greedo scene's subs as a guide to how much needs to be adjusted on the sides.

Yeah I can probably help. I could make like one setting for each reel, since their colors seem slightly different.

Hey Puggo, I watched GRANDE and Stjärnornas Krig, and I gotta say I haven't yet had the time to read through this thread but I liked the little making-of videos that were on the DVDs.

Now you probably know from my thread that I love to take screenshots and play around with them a bit in photoshop. I did that with GRANDE, and noticed it was kind of easy to improve the colors a bit. Of course it's a matter of taste and "pureness" too but anyway, here they are. If you see a slight blur I added it to hide a bit of the sharpening artefacts in the screenshots, just a thing for my own taste.

Some of these might have come out too dark, but I just did some quick settings to see what could be done without much hassle. Anyway, my point is that maybe this is something to consider doing for a updated version sometime?

Really good job on these projects, either way. It was especially funny for me as a swede to see the original subtitles in the other version too!

msycamore said:

When the SW-prequel hit our cinemas in '99, there was some controversy due to Lucasfilm/Fox having done a swedish crawl and ALTA card for the first time, thinking they would do us a favor. Older people were used to and wanted to have the original english crawl with swedish subs instead.

I remember this very well since that was the first SW movie I saw in the cinema. And about the original trilogy: I was born in 84 so I missed out on all three originals in the cinema. :(  I think the first time I saw them was in 91 or 92 when they were broadcasted on TV. I think I still have ESB and ROTJ on VHS from those broadcasts. In 4:3 pan & scan I think.

Sorry btw Harmy for the off-topic talk. :)

msycamore said:

Yeah, that's a wonderful translation. ;)

There is both swedish subs and the original english subs for Greedo present, that's how it often was handled in the old days. You have a still of the subs from the swedish print in this thread: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Greedo-Jabba-subtitles-theatrical-placement-and-fonts/topic/11463/ See the third pic.

Interesting. I really gotta get that version sometime.

Speaking of translations, the swedish subs on the GOUT are a bit funny sometimes too. Where Han says to Chewie "Get in there, you big furry oaf!" they've translated it as "Ner, din håriga gorilla!". (Down, you hairy gorilla!) Kind of bad translation considering there are no gorillas in the Star Wars galaxy. :)