Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

[overdrive]

At all???? Please, could you compare shot of titles??

Bulma is not albina, like in your snapshot with excess of blue (AWB is good but isnt for this source, that has irregular changes of color). If I had done this colour correction, which that is (in less o greater amount), because that other part of video, colour is fine.

I encourage you to do your color correction throughout the video and observe the result in the entire video.

My results is fine for me, and I had named colour correction because it is. By posting here do not seek recognition or approval from anyone.

[Ajay]

Yeah, I do agree Puto's CC is far too blue. The skin tones are mostly accurate in that shot, it's more just the overall cast that needs removing.

But yeah, Overdrive, yours so have differences, they're just not as big as they could be. If they look fine to you, that's all good but if you're posting them in a Colour Correction thread, expect criticism.

[overdrive]

Of course I want to criticize, not problem with this. (my english is bad and maybe I can not express that I want)

The problem of doing hard colour correction is lost of details (dark areas). The neck of the jacket is darkened so that the seams do not notice.Example:

[lansing]

overdrive, there's no methodical way to do color correction using yuv tools as of today. You'll need to use RGB tools such as curve and levels. And Avisynth is far from being a program for color correction.

Here is one color corrected with levels:


And you can always use curve to pull up the brightness on the dark area if you think it's too dark.

[overdrive]

lansing, I know but in earlier I posted, this change in colourspace involves lost quality, even working in 16 bitdepth. However, I recognize that I like your correction.

[overdrive]

I had can reproduce your shot, more or less, with:

Smoothlevels(debug=false,protect=16,preset="tv2pc")

smoothcurve(ycurve="0-0;255-250",Ucurve="0-14;255-255",Vcurve="0-0;255-248")

Now, I should pull up brightness in dark areas.

EDIT:

[lansing]

lansing, I know but in earlier I posted, this change in colourspace involves lost quality, even working in 16 bitdepth. However, I recognize that I like your correction.

Quality lost from colorspace conversion is the least thing you would worry about, as those were just some rounding errors.

And by curve and levels tools, I'm talking about RGB curve and levels. Smoothlevels and smoothcurve from avisynth are for YUV.

For making dark area brighter using curve, I'm talking about something like this:



I couldn't really see your result from the thumbnail images, but from the script you use, it makes very little sense to me.

[overdrive]

Not problem, I can use smooth levels and result is fine. I know that you are refering to RGB tools, but I prefer not change spacecolour. (crazes )

The script of above not is full fine, I've tweaked it a little more. Example:



ATW, thanks for you help and comments.

PD: Avisynth hasnt limits XD

[lansing]

The problem with YUV color correcting is that you simply can't do it, it's not just a matter of choice.
The YCbCr parade couldn't tell you anything about color balancing, how do you color correct something when you didn't even know what is white and what is black from the graph?

[overdrive]

Using info Luma/Chroma Channels. http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Color_conversions

As an example, the colors black, white and yellow will be computed in various color formats:

In RGB [0,255] black is given by r=0, g=0, b=0. It follows that R=0, G=0, B=0. Calculating the Y, V and U values using the Rec.601 coefficients gives: Y=0, V=0 and U=0. In YUV [16,235] this corresponds to y=16, v=128, u=128.

In RGB [0,255] white is given by r=255, g=255, b=255. It follows that R=1, G=1, B=1. Calculating the Y, V and U values using the Rec.601 coefficients gives: Y=1, V=0 and U=0. In YUV [16,235] this corresponds to y=235, v=128, u=128.

For curiosity: Any tool like smoothtools for RGB??? I had saw http://avisynth.nl/index.php/RGBAdjust but for setting curve??

[lansing]

Using info Luma/Chroma Channels. http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Color_conversions

In RGB, we know something is black/gray/white by reading the rgb value rgb(x,x,x), where the three x's are the same. We know that once we balanced a black point, rgb(11,11,11) for example, that point will stay black relative to the change in brightness, you're not going to see it changed to blue or other colors when we brighten it up.

However, under YUV color space, luma and chroma are separated, manipulating luma will have no effect on chroma. So if we lower the luma value to 0, that doesn't make a selected color (such as a dark blue hair) black, it just means that it loses its brightness, but the chroma values are still there. And if we raise the luma again, the chroma (dark blue) will come back again.

Because of this, color correction in YUV space just doesn't make sense since we can't come up with a black/gray/white point regardless of brightness.

For curiosity: Any tool like smoothtools for RGB??? I had saw http://avisynth.nl/index.php/RGBAdjust but for setting curve??

I don't know.

[overdrive]

I understand your point of view, when I modify the combination of channels Y,U,V; this doesn't mean that I'm changing the information that the pixels keep. Nevertheless, this doesn't impede me to get a correct colour combination display, mixing these YUV chanels, although the keeped information says that. Nevertheless, if I do this attachment and then I do a RGB conversion, the values I'll get will be different than the ones I would get if I don't modify the YUV combination values, so inherently won't be a change of colour for you, but it will be in the way it is represented

[AnimeMaakuo]

I understand your point of view, when I modify the combination of channels Y,U,V; this doesn't mean that I'm changing the information that the pixels keep. Nevertheless, this doesn't impede me to get a correct colour combination display, mixing these YUV chanels, although the keeped information says that. Nevertheless, if I do this attachment and then I do a RGB conversion, the values I'll get will be different than the ones I would get if I don't modify the YUV combination values, so inherently won't be a change of colour for you, but it will be in the way it is represented

Grain is part of the image. It's just how film works. Grain holds detail. Wiping grain means wiping detail. There's no way around it at this point.

[lansing]

I understand your point of view, when I modify the combination of channels Y,U,V; this doesn't mean that I'm changing the information that the pixels keep. Nevertheless, this doesn't impede me to get a correct colour combination display, mixing these YUV chanels, although the keeped information says that. Nevertheless, if I do this attachment and then I do a RGB conversion, the values I'll get will be different than the ones I would get if I don't modify the YUV combination values, so inherently won't be a change of colour for you, but it will be in the way it is represented

Grain is part of the image. It's just how film works. Grain holds detail. Wiping grain means wiping detail. There's no way around it at this point.

What are you talking about?? I don't quite understand what he means but I'm still pretty sure that he wasn't talking about grain removal.

[UltimateHammerBro]

I don't understand much, but I think he was talking about color correction, and not grain removal.

[Ashura]

Gotta say, I'm surprised this thread is still going!

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.

Yes, though up front I say that this is a way to do this with mostly free tools; you can do a much more precise job using the histograms. Though I think your posts are a little harsh to say this is a 'blind guess.' I understand you mean it's not looking at the histograms (thus, blind), but there's still some reference going on. It's just not as accurate. I 100% agree the scope is much more accurate method, though I couldn't count on people here having something like Premiere. Also, in terms of final color, I was using stills printed inside of the Super Exciting Guide and Dragon Book as reference for a lot of this work when figuring out the colors. I didn't just pick what looked good to me.

One thing I'll say about sampling the black point: It's much harder to find thick areas of true black throughout the scenes, because SD anime is such a low resolution that the surrounding colors often contaminate the linework, and the lines are the only thing you can usually assure were true black at one point. As such the lines will be comprised of whatever hues which surround the lines; so if you pick a black point that has blue mixed into it you're going to mess with blues. Or if it's contaminated in the reds, the reds. Which I feel, in this case, is a less accurate result than adjusting the hues after doing the balance on the whites.

I'm curious what your method for CCing that previous Bulma shot was, though? Can you walk us through it maybe? It still seems somewhat red to me, but the contrast is really nice.

[Ashura]

Sorry to bump this thread and double post, but I wanted to say something about this thread because I get a lot of PMs about it.

-Please do not PM me asking for copies of the Dragon Box, finished copies of my color corrected episodes, and so on. I will not send them to you.
-I only did a bunch of early episodes of DB and some DB movies and DBZ stuff I liked. I did not do the entire series. So I do not have scripts for the entire series.
-I can try to dig up the scripts I did for the series, but they're my preferences, not everyone else's.
-I unfortunately do not have time to help people debug things in this thread. I'm currently working 3 jobs, so my time to answer questions is kind of limited. However, there seems to be a lot of people who read this thread who should be able to help you if you have problems.
-Any further tech questions I get in PMs about this thread I'll likely not reply to. I apologize. I'm not trying to be rude, but I just don't have time currently to answer all of this stuff.

Again, sorry to bump this thread, but I felt it would be best to make a blanket statement instead of sending tons of PMs.

[Ajay]

Semi-necropost, I guess. This thread has somehow stayed alive intermittently for nearly 3 years now.

I just started up my own 'little' project involving the Dragon Boxes.

Using the Japanese boxes as a source due to their mammoth bitrate; I'm colour correcting each episode and replacing the audio with the remastered versions that FUNi did for their recent Season Sets. I'm also OCRing all the DVD image subs so I can have nice antialiased text instead.

I'd planned to do this should I ever receive some more broadcast-level audio but I feel like that's probably not going to happen anytime soon since someone couldn't keep things to themselves and fucked it up for everyone else. Considering the Dragon Box audio is horrendously out of sync as it is, I may as well use the best we've got and get it right.

I've only tackled three episodes so far since most of my time was spent actually working out the least destructive way of going about this.

Here's some shots of episode 1 to showcase my progress so far:

Spoiler:

I've been using a mixture of Kai and some cels as a reference point for the colours. There's also a little bit of personal taste in there too. It was tough to choose between 'easy and quick' (like the Level Sets' colours) and 'time consuming and hard' (like Kai's colours). I feel like if I'm going to do this, I may as well do it to a standard that I very much enjoy.

Unfortunately, you do get some very minor artifacting in some areas during the process. There's not much I can do about that without sacrificing colour accuracy. That's just the nature of working from an encode rather than a high resolution master. The dark detail simply isn't there. But hey, at least I can make the show look relatively modern without resorting to this.

This is going to be one hell of a time consuming process but it's something I've wanted to do for many years. I figured now's probably just as good a time as any.

[cheetos]

Just jumping in, but do you think the OVA would be worth restoring? I have had a pretty alright copy of "PTEAS" for quite some time now,but it still looks kind of murky. Upon finding this thread I immediately took the chance to try and take out the color cast, Success! Now working on Leveling out color, maybe I'll bring out the individual colors more.



This is my first attempt. Seems kind of bright to me but I'm going to bed and don't feel like messing with it anymore until tomorrow.

[LordCrumb]

Just jumping in, but do you think the OVA would be worth restoring? I have had a pretty alright copy of "PTEAS" for quite some time now,but it still looks kind of murky. Upon finding this thread I immediately took the chance to try and take out the color cast, Success! Now working on Leveling out color, maybe I'll bring out the individual colors more.



This is my first attempt. Seems kind of bright to me but I'm going to bed and don't feel like messing with it anymore until tomorrow.

Yes far too bright. Based on that screenshot, i'd rather watch the one on the left.