.

[Mountain]

Those look great, Metalwario64! Man, I should really make my own custom DVD-Rs with color correction similar to some of these shots, as well as subtitles, using the R2 DBOX footage.

[Pokewhiz7]

Digital NR: Off, Low, Medium, High, Auto.

I would turn this off.

[Mountain]

Digital NR: Off, Low, Medium, High, Auto.

I would turn this off.

Definitely.

I can't begin to know the proper calibration settings for your display (color-wise, especially), but I will give some suggestions based on your current settings. I'd honestly turn the backlight down some, as it will brighten your black levels (which you want as inky as possible). Also, I'd turn the sharpness pretty much all the way down. The sweet spot is usually around 3-4, actually, or just completely off; you'll have to tinker to see what looks best to you, but 50 is entirely too high. Turn edge enhancement off. If there's a 'warm' setting for color temperature, I'd set it to that (fairly standard in calibration). And, of course, noise reduction off.

[Metalwario64]

If there's a 'warm' setting for color temperature, I'd set it to that (fairly standard in calibration).

I am no expert in calibration, but wouldn't setting the temperature to warm make the whites look even more reddish and yellowish? On my TV setting the temperature to warm makes standard whites look yellow, so I wouldn't understand why using the warm temperature setting is recommended.

For whatever reason that may be recommended in standard calibration, but if you just want to make the Dragon Boxes look good, then since they already have warm colors most of the time (including red to yellow whites) I'd say that setting it to cool for the Dragon Boxes should slightly improve the whites. That's how it seems to work for me at least, so if I'm wrong then please correct me.

I also increase the green tint to make the skin tones look more natural, and the skies more blue. When watching anything else I turn the color temperature to normal, and put the tint more towards red.

[Mountain]

If there's a 'warm' setting for color temperature, I'd set it to that (fairly standard in calibration).

I am no expert in calibration, but wouldn't setting the temperature to warm make the whites look even more reddish and yellowish? On my TV setting the temperature to warm makes standard whites look yellow, so I wouldn't understand why using the warm temperature setting is recommended.

For whatever reason that may be recommended in standard calibration, but if you just want to make the Dragon Boxes look good, then since they already have warm colors most of the time (including red to yellow whites) I'd say that setting it to cool for the Dragon Boxes should slightly improve the whites. That's how it seems to work for me at least, so if I'm wrong then please correct me.

I also increase the green tint to make the skin tones look more natural, and the skies more blue. When watching anything else I turn the color temperature to normal, and put the tint more towards red.

It may take some getting used to, but the 6500K (warm) setting is industry standard for calibration. It will give you the most natural picture, which the pros all use in color-correcting through the final masters. If you want to see the picture as intended by the director, you should try it out. In the end, though, it's all a matter of preference I suppose; I can't tell you how to watch your TV, so just enjoy it the way you like.

[jjgp1112]

In my experience, warm makes the colors look more yellowish while cool puts it more on the blue-white spectrum.

[Metalwario64]

It may take some getting used to, but the 6500K (warm) setting is industry standard for calibration. It will give you the most natural picture, which the pros all use in color-correcting through the final masters. If you want to see the picture as intended by the director, you should try it out.

I was unaware of that, so I may give it a shot, maybe outside of video games and the Dragon Boxes.

Still, while it may make the Dragon Boxes colors look like they should on your TV, AnimeMaakuo wanted to get rid of the red/yellow tinting, and since warm tints the picture red/yellow, setting the temperature to cool should almost negate that, making the whites look at least a bit better.

Though after watching my Dragon Boxes again and switching between color temperatures, it seems cool indeed makes whites look better, but it makes the skin tones look a bit paler. The warm setting makes the skin tones look more tan and less pink, but it makes their eyes look pretty yellow too (especially against the white subtitles), so I suppose you just pick your preference in this case.

In my experience, warm makes the colors look more yellowish while cool puts it more on the blue-white spectrum.

Yup, that's what it does. After all, yellow is a warm color, whereas blue is a cool color.

[Toriyama-sama]

Alright, folks! Time for a Physics class /jk

Every object emits radiation (light), and its emission spectrum is [almost] solely determined by its temperature. The higher the temperature the shorter the wavelengths of the emitted light and vice versa. Now, shorter wavelengths correspond to blue light and longer ones to red light.
At room temperature (roughly 300 K or 27 ºC or 80 ºF), the emission spectrum has very long wavelengths (which correspond to infrared radiation), and that's why we can't see it; at about 798 K (525 ºC or 977 ºF) objects start to glow with a very dull reddish tone (yes, that's incandescence); at higher temperatures, that reddish glow becomes more intense, and when you go even higher it eventually changes colours, getting progressively whiter (like sunlight) and even a little blueish when you reach approximately 6,500 K (6,773 ºC or 12,223 ºF) which is the standard adopted by the industry.

So, long story short, in this context, warmer colours actually relate to blue hues and cooler colours to red hues

[Raithos]

I just dropped 200 to get all of them, don't show me stuff like this to discourage me dammit. :/

[Pieter]

I believe 9300k is the standard colour temperature in Japan, wheras in the west its 6500K. Which is perhaps why the images look better when reducing redness / warmth.

Metalwario64 could you try the exact same formula youve used on a different episode from a different saga? Because perhaps its different with every episode or environment.

[Metalwario64]

Metalwario64 could you try the exact same formula youve used on a different episode from a different saga? Because perhaps its different with every episode or environment.

Well, as I've stated earlier, I'm editing each individual color for these corrections in Photoshop, and I do it on an image-by-image basis, so there's no real formula that I'm simply reusing on each image. Though, you are right that it's different nearly every episode. Some episodes have aged better than others (mostly the later you get in the series), and different episodes have different tints, whereas one will have a red tint, others will have a yellow tint, green tint, or I've even seen a blueish tint in an episode.

That said, at the very least I'll show you some more corrections for other episodes and arcs, so you can see how different each episode can look. I don't have any VHS comparisons from kei17 to base these off of, so I'm only going from what he's said about the original colors, and what I've seen so far. I'm certain these aren't as accurate as possible, so if there are any glaring flaws, I'd like it if kei17 could point them out.

Anyway, here they are:

Dragon Box:


Corrected:


Dragon Box:


Corrected:


Dragon Box:


Corrected:


The following images haven't changed as drastically, but still show improvement:

Dragon Box:


Corrected:


Dragon Box:


Corrected:


As you can see, the following episode already has a very blue sky (which I added a bit more blue to), and it's one of the few episodes I've seen so far that has a sorta blue tint:

Dragon Box:


Corrected:

[DanielGClapp]

I like the correction you did to fix the reddish skin tone frames, but I don't like how you corrected Piccolo. The Dragon Box looks perfect to me, but your corrections look like he's almost yellow. Thats just what I think.

[Metalwario64]

I don't like how you corrected Piccolo. The Dragon Box looks perfect to me, but your corrections look like he's almost yellow. Thats just what I think.

That's how he's colored in the animation cels.

[DanielGClapp]

Oh my! Well, then never mind. Good job! I thought that the Dragon Box didn't over saturate the colors? According to the original cells, they did. And quite a bit, might a add. Oh well, it's still much much better than the orange bricks.

[Metalwario64]

I thought that the Dragon Box didn't over saturate the colors? According to the original cells, they did. And quite a bit, might a add. Oh well, it's still much much better than the orange bricks.

Well, they likely chose brighter, slightly more saturated colors for the cels with the intention that they'd be dulled during the transfer to film. If I recall correctly, many old animated films did the same thing.

After researching,I found this post which I'm sure is what I was recalling.

[bkev]

I was going to say something similar to what Metalwario said but I had no information to back it up. Gaffer cites the exact Sleeping Beauty issue I was going to... although I haven't seen the blu-ray for myself so I would have to judge.

edit: to play devil's advocate that could easily be on a case-by-case basis. I doubt '50s big-movie Disney has the same process as any anime company producing a TV series...

[TonyTheTiger]

I don't like how you corrected Piccolo. The Dragon Box looks perfect to me, but your corrections look like he's almost yellow. Thats just what I think.

That's how he's colored in the animation cels.

Are we sure that the colors on the cels are what we're supposed to see on TV, though? I mentioned this in another post elsewhere. Let me see if I can find it..

Here we go:

*snip*

I was wondering if these same colors are in the Dragonbox.

I don't want to be a wet blanket, but I have to say this again. The colours on the DBOX footage are quite faded and discolored due to the aging of the master films. They are incorrect and not how they originally looked. This is the fact that Toei confirmed. You have to refer to the colour coordinations or the cels to check the original colours.

Are we absolutely certain about that? Not doubting it as likely but consider what TV broadcasts were like circa 1990. HD it ain't. I wonder if it's possible that the animators intentionally chose some "off" colors because they knew that when displayed on TV it would appear as they wanted it to. So when you go back to the cels, the paint they did use looks strange by comparison.

It's not completely outrageous. Color tricks like that have been used in other mediums. Genesis games are notorious for using crosshatching patterns to achieve shading and transparency effects when played through composite or RF inputs which most everybody used at the time. Of course when played on emulators or through RGB all of a sudden you lose the effect and see the obvious crosshatching which you really weren't meant to see.

And unless Hollywoodland was lying to me, George Reeves wore an off-color Superman costume when they filmed in black and white because actual red and blue wouldn't have looked right under those conditions.

And Gaffer Tape's Sleeping Beauty example:

Yes, it's true. The example I constantly bring up is the complaints leveled at the Blu-ray release of Sleeping Beauty. They were criticized for color correcting to match the cells, when everyone who knew animation knew that the colors of the cells weren't the colors that were intended. The animators had purposely oversaturated the cells because they were aware that they'd be dulled somewhat upon being photographed.

I think that's the rub here when it comes to discussing the "real" colors. The Dragon Box may be off but it's difficult to determine just quite how they may be off. And if they are off, why are they? That's probably why it's difficult to figure out a formula to "fix" the colors across the board. Furthermore, we don't even know what the animators had to deal with on an episode to episode basis that might account for slight color differences.

That's why I'm loath to describe the Dragon Box as "the way it was meant to be seen" or "how the show should look" or various other presumptions. I think it's fairer to say that the Dragon Box is the best we have available (upcoming Blu-rays notwithstanding).

No disrespect to anybody trying to correct the images or arguing that what the DVDs look wrong. But, at the same time, it's hard to pinpoint just what we were supposed to see vs. what was on the cels/film and how to attain the former given the uncertainty. The VHS recordings are the best we've got to go on but it's kind of a crapshoot when you have to do different things on an episode by episode basis to get within the ballpark of those colors. There might be a lot of educated guessing which ultimately takes us back to square one with people saying "those aren't the right colors."

[Toriyama-sama]

I've been wanting to post something on this topic for a while, and now that others have brought up many of the points I wanted to make I guess the timing couldn't be more right.


When it comes to film I don't think we can speak of stuff like "the true colours", since film degrades over time and there's no way to know exactly how it looked like in the beggining. Not to mention the fact that the overlay of different animation cells, the actual process of filming and the lighting the director of photography decides to apply to each frame all have impact on the final result (you can easily check this out if, for instance, you compare matching frames of the ending credits of different episodes; you will clearly see a difference and if I recall correctly someone posted a picture a few days ago showing precisely this). On top of it, it should be noted that different film reels may age at different rates, even if kept under the same storage conditions (which, by the way, may very well have changed over time, for all we know).

Comparing VHS and DVD shots isn't really fair either, because not only can VHS video fade over time as well, it also has much less chroma resolution than DVD (no more than 30 lines VS 120 lines). That's why VHS video usually looks rather dark and/or washed out when measured against more recent, digital formats.

All in all, from the moment the footage was created till the time the Dragon Box masters were made, between 8 and 18 years passed. Definitely not that much even for 16 mm film (seeing as how it was kept in cold storage). The film did age; we don't know how much, nevertheless it did, though most assuredly not as much as some people here seem to imply. The green sky and the pink skin arguments are frequently brought up, but the truth is only in a few episodes of the Saiyan saga do you see the green sky and the really pink skin. For example, in the first episode of Dragon Ball, the sky is flat-out blue and there's virtually no trace of the pink skin. We may certainly wonder if something out of the ordinary happened to those Saiyan saga episodes' respective film reels, however we cannot discard the possibility of at least part of the issue being simply a matter of artistic choice (seeing as how skies with exotic colours aren't that rare in Dragon Ball and actually I for one really like the green sky).

Let me show you an example of how the same animation cell may ultimately result in notoriously differently coloured frames, in this case due to different lighting (you may also notice the somewhat pink skin, and don't forget this is an 11-year-old 35 mm film):

http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/7808/songokuj.png
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/4475/sup ... ongoku.png

In the end, I'm completely and equally fine with the following two ways of remastering film: either leave the colours as is (I dare to say that, like grain, age is also part of the film), or carry out a competent restoration preferably by whoever had important creative input in the making of said film in the first place. We got the former with the Dragon Boxes; we may get the latter when (and I believe it shall happen) Toei Animation finally decides to release the entire Dragon Ball franchise on Blu-ray.