Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

[Metalwario64]

Knowing that Vegeta's hair is brown in many cels, and officially became brown in the anime by the Freeza arc, is his hair a dark red/brown in this battle or particular episodes? I know by the time he gets hit by the genki dama, it shows brown, but what about earlier?

There are one or two shots where there is a brown highlight, but Kai with it's increased dark range shows it as black for the most part.

[Attitudefan]

Knowing that Vegeta's hair is brown in many cels, and officially became brown in the anime by the Freeza arc, is his hair a dark red/brown in this battle or particular episodes? I know by the time he gets hit by the genki dama, it shows brown, but what about earlier?

There are one or two shots where there is a brown highlight, but Kai with it's increased dark range shows it as black for the most part.

Ah, interesting to know that Toei was considering dropping his brown hair colour palette but brought it in full force by the end of the Freeza arc. hmmmm

[supersaiyajingohan30]

hey i can't seem to get the dvd video to play and i can't figure out how to do the setting up steps.
can someone do a dummies version of this i really want to make my dragon boxes look good please can someone help me?

[lansing]

The OP's method of removing color cast is technically wrong, or unfinished.
You can't remove a color cast by only balancing the white, you need to balance the black, gray and white points, or at least black and white points in order to make it to work.

[overdrive]

With AWB for avisynth I have get this:





What do you think?? The work of Ashura is great but laborious, and with one line of code I get similar results.

[kei17]

You'll get something like this if you go with the most laborious way on After Effects.

[overdrive]

I see that level of yellow is too high, the results is not bad but i dont like.

[ect5150]

I see that level of yellow is too high, the results is not bad but i dont like.

Nothing will be perfect given the nature of the DVD's. Even if you like kei17's colors, you'll notice there are still artifacts in the greens. Just find something you like (or can live with) and have fun. Put as much effort into it as you'd like. You can put a LOT of effort into it and still find errors in it (which is why I'm convinced the only true uber-master set could ever be put out by Toei... from having the original masters).

[overdrive]

Well, I have developed a script for filtering DB, with diferents colour corrections for each episode. I put some screenshots:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

[LordCrumb]

^ Aside from the DNR, the colours look the same?

[overdrive]

^ Aside from the DNR, the colours look the same?

Really, do you think this?

My colour correction sets u-v chroma levels because dragon box is mpeg2 yv12. Any other type of correction involves a change of color space (RGB or CMYK) and the consequent loss of quality.

[Ajay]

Yeah, those colours are no different. The most you can do via an automated process is shift the whites into being white. Unfortunately that doesn't deal with red skin tones because a PC isn't smart enough to know what colour that red hue is meant to actually be.

[overdrive]

I had change levels of chroma of yv12 colourspace, u and v channel contains information of chroma n(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YUV). Are you saying that colour is not affected for my change???

Not only whites into being white, blacks are blacks now (hair of gokuh), blue-cyan is blue-cyan and not green-cyan (hair of Bulmam, sky, etc...), reds are reds and not orange (Demon Oolong).

I know that I not change values using RGB colourspace but saying that colours not change, for me, not is correct. ( Iam happy witb the result ^_^)

PD: I am not using AWB.

[SaiyaJedi]

One thing I've wondered about:

Supposing we were able to discover the exact paints they used for each hue of the solid areas (say, by cross-referencing extant cels with the materials that were available at the time), and were able to glean their RGB values in order to figure out what the colors were "supposed" to be... would it make for more-meaningful color-correction in the end result?

[thaman91]

I'm not really that technically savvy, but I do think that there is a color difference. The "before" pictures seem to have more of a green tint than the "after" pictures. I think this is most noticeable between the two "Dragon Ball" logo pictures.

[Ajay]

I'm not really that technically savvy, but I do think that there is a color difference. The "before" pictures seem to have more of a green tint than the "after" pictures. I think this is most noticeable between the two "Dragon Ball" logo pictures.

Yeah, I mean, he's made whites actually white. The general off-cast of the image has been eradicated but that's only a very small issue. Automated colour correction simply can't fix the huge shifts in skin tone. It can't guess what colour they are meant to be; it just goes by basic white point information among other relatively basic things. Even if you took the broken skin tones and made a script to ensure that colour was always shifted to the correct one, you'd end up with other colours changing too since it can't differentiate between separate areas of the picture.

Essentially, you'd have to do it manually.

[Puto]

Except he didn't.



This is not white.

[Ajay]

Ah yeah, took them over to my calibrated monitor and it was pretty obvious. My bad, I just using the one I generally use for movies and stuff.

[overdrive]

Except he didn't.

This is not white.

yes, that's right, is not a pure white, but every colour depends of the scene in which appears, it depends of the shadows too... so every colour adquires different values in the same colour range. If all colours would be in the same value, without changing his range, this would be like a Simpsons episode.

[Puto]

The problem is that there's almost no colour correction at all in the shots you posted.


(original on the left, your 'correction' on the right)

You barely touched the colours. You can't call something 'colour correction' if you're not even going to do anything to the colours.

For comparison, here's your shot after some very basic correcting — if it was done properly, it'd look a lot better, but just to give an idea...


(original on the left, basic point balance on the right)