Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

[lansing]

some cards use cels but they are not an accurate source as some have totally wrong colors (was done before the anime) example:
[spoiler]
[/spoiler] those colors are wrong
but you can more use those cels given by toei on their vod website (beware some are dbox screenshot)
[spoiler]




[/spoiler]
The sky is allways blue but have some kind of variations

Those are NOT the power level cards.

This is power level cards:
https://youtu.be/3-6qbosbYcI?t=1m28s

[HakkaiBills93]

yes they used cels

[tellyzbad1]

I'm interested in seeing more of this person's color correcting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh0HHaGyATg Reminds me of the Kai/cels look.

That's assumign these are color corrected Dragon Box and not some foreign release.

[lansing]

I'm interested in seeing more of this person's color correcting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh0HHaGyATg Reminds me of the Kai/cels look.

That's assumign these are color corrected Dragon Box and not some foreign release.

You mean this guy?

Have fun reading, just a heads up, he's bad.

[HakkaiBills93]

His cc isn t totally accurate and don t work on thé whole series hé could have done better work and could have been interresting if hé wasn t so shitty minde, arrogant and à great liar ....him and hiis friends don t worth talking about them

[tellyzbad1]

I'm interested in seeing more of this person's color correcting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh0HHaGyATg Reminds me of the Kai/cels look.

That's assumign these are color corrected Dragon Box and not some foreign release.

You mean this guy?

Have fun reading, just a heads up, he's bad.

Yeah, pretty bad. So what's up with the YouTube video then? The colors look great to me. Is it a different source than the Dragon Box?

What was the reference for this color correction? Skimming through the past pages, this is the best color correction I've seen so far. Ugly degraining but good color work.

[jjgp1112]

I'm interested in seeing more of this person's color correcting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh0HHaGyATg Reminds me of the Kai/cels look.

That's assumign these are color corrected Dragon Box and not some foreign release.

Oh no. No no no no no no. His color correction is rather poor and based on just completely wrong colors. We had to deal with that idiot on here a while back. Not to mention half the comments on his video are him talking to himself.

[HakkaiBills93]

@tellyzbad1: we will finish by thinking you are enigmo yourself ..Enigmo is the kind of people that create account to talk about his video to others and your broadcast audio knowledge make me thinking you are him, but it's not a matter .
His colors aren't accurate at all
here his "color correction" and a cel to the right only in this screenshot i see 2 colors that are totally wrong

more than that his color are way too soft like if he wanted to do things like dragon ball kai BUT color correction isn't to make z looking like kai and i don't talk about use of DNR etc...
Enigmo don't want to understand cause to a totally shitty ego. He have some good knowledge but everything else from him will totally break interest
for example he was in the first that got by shitty way the z broadcast audio but he have allways (and keep doing it) try people thinking he have remastered dragon box audio or that he got the master audio (that have been definitely throw away)

[tellyzbad1]

I'm not Enigmo...I didn't know CNXToonami was Enigmo, but I know Enigmo from making AMVs.

https://www.youtube.com/user/Bellyzbad1 This is my YouTube channel; I make DBZ AMVs.

And I'm not talking about color accuracy. The style of color correction in the video I linked is similar to DB Kai and I read people talking about it being hard to color correct like Kai. All you're talking about is the sky is too yellow in his one compared to the cel. It's not hard to make it greener, even I can do that and I'm not an expert on color correction. But the overall aesthetic in that video I linked looks more like Kai than color-changed Dragon Box.

Also, just so you know, those VOD thumbnails aren't a perfect reference. In many of them, Goku's blue top is too dark/purple. In many cels this is not the case. So yeah, stop relying on those VOD thumbnails as reference.

[HakkaiBills93]

Glad that you are not him....those vod cels have thé right colors for namek enigmo cc is another green.....thé things is that à color correction is à rrerestoration process so make dbox like db dbz dbgt was looking originaly not making dbox like kai which have his own color palette .... enigmo have good technical knowledge but it s not color correction if you make it like you want instead of making it look like it was

[MrWalnut4]

Pretty common misconception. The sky is actually supposed to be green in that fight.

Not according to kei17. Can't remember where or when, but I think he's presented the best evidence for the blue sky (as seen in the Level Sets). To be fair, those sets do have a hint of green... but no where near the DBox or Kai set levels.

I remember kei said it was supposed to be slightly green but not as much as dbox

Exactly he said this in this topic there:
[spoiler]

a better idea, have someone buy the whole package and screen capture all the episodes...well that'll take a long time. The price is higher than the old anime in bandai channel, but it's still reasonable.
Now we have to first make sure that the color in the show are indeed what they looks like in the thumbnails.

It's the Dragon Box footage. They used these cel scans just for thumbnails.

So, we actually have a better reference to target those episodes? Green sky? Blue sky? Teal sky is it now? The clouds actually have some green in them, which surprises me.

The sky is originally a little greenish on episode 30 to 35, but not as much as that on the DBox. That's the intended color.

[/spoiler]

Exactly. The best references for the sky color during those few episodes are those Toei cel scans as well as the few cels that are occasionally sold online. Albeit slightly inaccurate due to image compression and aging, this cel scan is a fairly good indicator of the intended color of the sky during the beginning faze of the Goku vs. Vegeta fight (but not in the later stages as the sky becomes darker and greener later in the fight).
[spoiler][/spoiler]
Also as a small aside, the cel scans provided by Toei are not entirely accurate to the actual cels used to film the series. They tend to me more crushed in both blacks and whites, saturated, and slightly color shifted compared to the actual cels themselves.

Take this comparison of a Toei cel scan vs. a raw cel scan from the same arc and same character.
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]
While both are more pleasing than the aged film of the Dragon Box, they are different enough references to cause questions on which is the intended color palette. I personally think the raw cel scan is closer to the intended look and more pleasing at that but others may disagree. Acknowledging this difference is however important.

[HakkaiBills93]

No if you check the vod cels is darker than thé other that s why végéta cloth and haïr are darker if you check with à tool like in paint lol you ll see that it s thé same color with dark variations ...cels aren t perfect for sure but those colors are right

[HakkaiBills93]

people never get that depending luminosity,contrast, brightness etc even for the same part of an episode, the colors will be also affecting so if you have dark contrast the blue (here it's a dark blue maybe even purple) your colors will be darker, if you check your first cels is lighter in colors so his cloth color will be also lighter
it can even varying from one scene to another so you'll never get the exact original colors as you can't know which was originally the brightness, luminosity etc...and you have to play with YOUR footage so just keep the closest you can

[clutchins]

You really need to consider a range of sources that include the cels as well as the Kai palette and original broadcast recordings. There is no definitive color source out there yet for us to reference the entirety of the series.

[Robo4900]

You really need to consider a range of sources that include the cels as well as the Kai palette and original broadcast recordings. There is no definitive color source out there yet for us to reference the entirety of the series.

Yeah, this very much.

Cels always came out differently on film than they looked drawn, and depending on the individual image online, a lot of cels have vastly different shades of their colours, so you really can't trust them 100%.

[HakkaiBills93]

Exact but you know that orange is orange blue is blue etc ....thé green on thé enigmo isn t à shade of thé green from thé cels that s why i Saïd it s wrong for sure

[tellyzbad1]

It really isn't as complicated as you guys are making it out to be. Our fixable problems with the DBox are the color cast, the blue-cyan sky being a green-cyan, Goku's orange gi being too red and blue top being too magenta, and some characters having too pink of a skin tone. Fix those and, well...what more do you want? It's funny we're still talking about this, though, because I'm pretty sure Ashura himself already did all these things way back in his original post, 5 years ago.

Genjosanzo8, why are you bothering talking about luminosity? The brightness & contrast is not a fixed object that we can replicate. This factor is constantly changed. The film printing changed it from how they'd look to our eyes on the physical cels; the broadcast changed it from what it was on the film; each viewer's TV setup gave them differing levels; the type of DVD encoding also slightly changes it; your screen monitor changes it...ALSO, those VOD thumbnails you obsess over: I can safely bet that they also had their brightness levels adjusted to the customs of the individual responsible. In my opinion, it's no good to talk as if there's some "correct" values for the luminosity & contrast. When it comes to this regard, it's just a matter of using common sense and doing what's comfortable for our eyes. Just don't pull an orange bricks and bleach the shit out of it, and don't darken it to where it looks "too dark", and you're good. I would also say all of this applies to saturation.

For me, with the DBox DVDs, you will never be able to fix the brightness & darkness levels to a satisfying state because a significant amount of tones have been totally clipped from both ends...

Anyway, with color correcting DBox, the main concern is to as I said eliminate the color cast and figuring out what hues to use. Choosing what hues to go for isn't hard but it's hard to actually apply. This is because, for instance, you can't change Goku's blue top from magenta->blue without also affecting Piccolo/Gohan's magenta gi; you can't change Goku's gi from red to orange without causing Jeice's red skin to look too orange. Q-Tec, however, were able to do this amazingly with Kai. We will never be able to do this to DBox without masking, but I'd say it's unwise to invest all the time required to do this, since I don't trust any of us fans here to do a non-botched job of it.

[HakkaiBills93]

It really isn't as complicated as you guys are making it out to be. Our fixable problems with the DBox are the color cast, the blue-cyan sky being a green-cyan, Goku's orange gi being too red and blue top being too magenta, and some characters having too pink of a skin tone. Fix those and, well...what more do you want? It's funny we're still talking about this, though, because I'm pretty sure Ashura himself already did all these things way back in his original post, 5 years ago.

Genjosanzo8, why are you bothering talking about luminosity? The brightness & contrast is not a fixed object that we can replicate. This factor is constantly changed. The film printing changed it from how they'd look to our eyes on the physical cels; the broadcast changed it from what it was on the film; each viewer's TV setup gave them differing levels; the type of DVD encoding also slightly changes it; your screen monitor changes it...ALSO, those VOD thumbnails you obsess over: I can safely bet that they also had their brightness levels adjusted to the customs of the individual responsible. In my opinion, it's no good to talk as if there's some "correct" values for the luminosity & contrast. When it comes to this regard, it's just a matter of using common sense and doing what's comfortable for our eyes. Just don't pull an orange bricks and bleach the shit out of it, and don't darken it to where it looks "too dark", and you're good. I would also say all of this applies to saturation.

For me, with the DBox DVDs, you will never be able to fix the brightness & darkness levels to a satisfying state because a significant amount of tones have been totally clipped from both ends...

Anyway, with color correcting DBox, the main concern is to as I said eliminate the color cast and figuring out what hues to use. Choosing what hues to go for isn't hard but it's hard to actually apply. This is because, for instance, you can't change Goku's blue top from magenta->blue without also affecting Piccolo/Gohan's magenta gi; you can't change Goku's gi from red to orange without causing Jeice's red skin to look too orange. Q-Tec, however, were able to do this amazingly with Kai. We will never be able to do this to DBox without masking, but I'd say it's unwise to invest all the time required to do this, since I don't trust any of us fans here to do a non-botched job of it.

i talk about luminosity , contrast etc only cause some people show differrents cels and say they have differrent colors but they have differrent brightness / contrast etc but the same colors
dbox can be color corrected but not perfectly like you said, and about luminosity darkness etc you can just have something just slight better cause for example if you make dark things appear, you'll got more artifact and some other kind of trouble.

to cc i don't rely on toei cels only but lot of differrent cels, differrent foreign footage that degrade differrently, poster, etc that i cross each over to figure what colors i'll use
it's not that hard that's why i allways wondered why people don't share more screens of theirs work here.

[Robo4900]

It really isn't as complicated as you guys are making it out to be. Our fixable problems with the DBox are the color cast, the blue-cyan sky being a green-cyan, Goku's orange gi being too red and blue top being too magenta, and some characters having too pink of a skin tone. Fix those and, well...what more do you want? It's funny we're still talking about this, though, because I'm pretty sure Ashura himself already did all these things way back in his original post, 5 years ago.

Honestly, I think the DBoxes are fine as-is, and the only change I'd like is the removal of the colour cast. So yeah, I also don't really get why everyone's trying to over-complicate it, particularly since every attempt I've seen so far to replicate original broadcast colours, or cel colours, or whatever all have humongous flaws in their methods, whether it's unreliable cel scan accuracy, faded tapes, poor video encoding, or even just poorly-implemented CCing.
I think ultimately, the thing colour correctors need to get into their heads is that while being accurate is pretty cool, the only thing you need to worry about is making it look nice, because ultimately being truly "Accurate" is a lost cause, practically speaking. The only way you'll ever get properly accurate colours is in GT if you use the D2 tape masters as colour references. And even then, there are some points of debate there.
And really, just by removing the colour cast from the Dragon Boxes, you'll get something that looks pretty nice.

[MadSpecialist]

And really, just by removing the colour cast from the Dragon Boxes, you'll get something that looks pretty nice.

I was recently pondering the same thing, take the following comparison for example: