Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

[ect5150]

Pretty sure TV settings changes affect only what you actually see on the TV, not whatever's output into a recording.

TV settings might not be - but keep in mind many VHS recordings were passed around "back in the day." VCR to VCR recordings would certainly be influenced from the settings on devices - unless that is the original recording.

[fdsfgs71]

My apologies if this is considered necroposting, but I just tried my hand at color correcting the first Dragon Ball opening sequence. Is it alright if I post some screenshots? This is my first time attempting something like this and I barely know how to use VDub, AVS, and PS, and it's probably not going to look as well as it possibly could, but I'd still like to get some feedback and tips if it's fine.

[ect5150]

My apologies if this is considered necroposting, but I just tried my hand at color correcting the first Dragon Ball opening sequence. Is it alright if I post some screenshots? This is my first time attempting something like this and I barely know how to use VDub, AVS, and PS, and it's probably not going to look as well as it possibly could, but I'd still like to get some feedback and tips if it's fine.

Just post 'em! This seems to be one of the threads that makes its way back to the top every once in a while. I don't see the harm in necro-posting in a thread with so much valuable information. No one's results are perfect. It's all about learning and just generating a video that is color-wise better than the DBox.

[fdsfgs71]

My apologies if this is considered necroposting, but I just tried my hand at color correcting the first Dragon Ball opening sequence. Is it alright if I post some screenshots? This is my first time attempting something like this and I barely know how to use VDub, AVS, and PS, and it's probably not going to look as well as it possibly could, but I'd still like to get some feedback and tips if it's fine.

Just post 'em! This seems to be one of the threads that makes its way back to the top every once in a while. I don't see the harm in necro-posting in a thread with so much valuable information. No one's results are perfect. It's all about learning and just generating a video that is color-wise better than the DBox.

Alright then, here's the result of my attempt. The blues probably aren't as blue as I would have liked, and the oranges might be a bit too orange at spots, but I adjusted it as best as I could without introducing any major artifacting or macroblocking from the color tweaking. Warning: lots of images ahead.

Spoiler:

01


02


03


04


05


06


07


08


09


10


11


12


13


14

Looking at it now, I'm actually rather happy with how the blue levels turned out. Looking over the images closely it looks like I may have crushed a few blacks and lowered the brightness on the green unintentionally and I still think the oranges are probably too bright, but for the most part I rather like how it came out. Except for 10, that is, I'd like to learn how to remove the rest of the green from it while keeping the romaji lyrics from blending into the background.

Edit: I forgot to mention, thank for you for the help from about a month back ect5150, especially the tip on equalizing the black levels. That really helped.

[Ajay]

Looking over the images closely it looks like I may have crushed a few blacks and lowered the brightness on the green unintentionally

Those are definitely the major issues I noticed so I'm glad you picked u on them, too. You're heading in the right direction, though!

Are you scrubbing the grain? Kinda hard to tell from the images. Not my personal preference but hey ho.

[fdsfgs71]

Looking over the images closely it looks like I may have crushed a few blacks and lowered the brightness on the green unintentionally

Those are definitely the major issues I noticed so I'm glad you picked u on them, too. You're heading in the right direction, though!

Are you scrubbing the grain? Kinda hard to tell from the images. Not my personal preference but hey ho.

Yeah, I used the SMDegrain avisynth script from the previous page to try and remove any residual artifacts or macroblocking that might have popped up.

Any tips? I think I know how to fix the crushed blacks problem, and I think I know how I would go about brightening up the green levels as well, but some advice might be nice before I mess everything up accidentally.

[Ajay]

Not really. I take a pretty purist approach to colour correcting not to mention I work in After Effects so script based editing means nothing to me.

I use selective colour to isolate the channels and alter them individually since, due to the way film degrades, other means aren't all that useful.

I barely touch levels - only slightly bringing the blacks in. It's an old show, it's never going to have the contrast of something new without degrading the image.

I don't touch the grain as it's part of the show's aesthetic. Unless you're going for a Kai-esque remaster, I don't recommend it. Especially not on a DVD-source. Degrained DVDs look terrible.

[fdsfgs71]

Alright, thanks.

Once again, forgive my inexperience - this is literally my first attempt at color correction - but I'll give it another try tomorrow and see if I can't produce something that looks better. I'll try not to mess with the color intensity as much this time.

[Ajay]

It's not a problem. Everyone corrects to their own personal tastes. It's not like we have to adhere to any professional standards here.

[ect5150]

Spoiler:

01


02


03


04


05


06


07


08


09


10


11


12


13


14

Looking at it now, I'm actually rather happy with how the blue levels turned out. Looking over the images closely it looks like I may have crushed a few blacks and lowered the brightness on the green unintentionally and I still think the oranges are probably too bright, but for the most part I rather like how it came out. Except for 10, that is, I'd like to learn how to remove the rest of the green from it while keeping the romaji lyrics from blending into the background.

I think they look fine. I understand that people don't like to "crush the blacks" as it were... but there are plenty of images where the blacks have too much color to them. Episodes that have a heavy yellow color to them have the yellow in the whites and the blacks (like this one for example):

It's one of mine, but notice the colors int he black region of Goku's hair is something like R=8, G=16, B=2. I refuse to believe they didn't use or intend anything other than black paint for Goku's hair. When you force that yellow-ish color down to black (to R=0, G=0, B=0) it shows up in the rest of the episode (or at least the rest of the scene you are applying the transformation to). For me its a sacrifice I'm willing to make - others? not so much.

While I like mine just fine, I think you have better skin tones in a similar screen shot you have above as well.

Lastly, it takes SO much time to get an entire episode "perfect," I go insane. Don't know about the rest of you. Removing the color cast from the film, pushing the cyans to blues. Making one or two small tweaks to the oranges and you've spent 2 hours once you try to apply some audio offsets as well. I've learned to settle on good enough because of the time investment. If I ever doubt the work I've done, I look back at my progress gallery I've been making to remind me how wrong some of the original DBoxes were.

It's funny (or sad)--- they did such a good job with everything else in the DBox... why did they ignore the colors? The dust and scratch cleanup? Flawless considering the amount of material. The MPEG2 encoding? Great for the level of grain. The color adjustments? Eh... whatever!

EDIT: Since this thread is ongoing, I'll give one piece of advice to any people that may still pick it up. SAVE YOUR WORK! Whether you use scripts or something else (After Effects?). Each of these should have some mechanism where you can save what you did. This way if you ever find a mistake or something that you think you can still improve upon, you don't have to start from scratch - just re-rip the DVDs. These scripts are usually highly compressible and you can easily store them for future use (or for someone else's use).

[Ajay]

You are shifting your colours obscenely far into the blues. That change is far too drastic.

This is something I threw together in about 5 minutes.



Thinking about the colours in terms of the paint isn't the best way to go about things as it ignores the other creative aspects that go into the production - from lighting to the simple fact that different film stocks are often chosen to give a show an intended look.

Regarding blacks - you can remove casts from blacks without crushing them. Simply darkening them til the hue is gone is a lazy, destructive way of going about things. Again, it goes back to film - white is never going to perfectly white and black is never going to totally black.

[ect5150]

You are shifting your colours obscenely far into the blues. That change is far too drastic.

This is something I threw together in about 5 minutes.

Spoiler:

Thinking about the colours in terms of the paint isn't the best way to go about things as it ignores the other creative aspects that go into the production - from lighting to the simple fact that different film stocks are often chosen to give a show an intended look.

Regarding blacks - you can remove casts from blacks without crushing them. Simply darkening them til the hue is gone is a lazy, destructive way of going about things. Again, it goes back to film - white is never going to perfectly white and black is never going to totally black.

Fair enough, but your eyes are still too yellow:


While they visually look fine, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny - which is my original point. The time involved to get every screen "perfect" is a full time job. Mine is too blue, yours is too yellow. I believe you said it earlier... everyone uses their own preferences. This applies to color, time and technique as well.

[Ajay]

Again, five minute job and as I said, whites are never going to be perfectly white. That's just the nature of film. I can shift those to be perfectly white but then you're sacrificing accuracy in other areas of the image. You're never going to get a 'perfect' image that holds up to the precision of digital animation, you have to get as close as possible.

But take your colour dropper tool and go over the white text at the bottom of the screen. That's very close to white. Nothing is going to be perfectly consistent with a medium like this, and that's my point.

My efforts aren't perfect but they're pretty close. The only thing I'd go back and alter would probably be the skin tone and, as you pointed out, remove some of the extra yellow in areas.

[jjgp1112]

Yeah, I prefer to correct the blacks, too. I don't want to crush them necessarily, but I always make sure the color cast is gone from them and the levels are equalized. Here was my go at it:



On the other hand, with the ect's source picture, the lowest level was already 1, so when I equalized it, the black went down to zero, so it wound up looking the same as his result. I use Gimp, and with the Levels feature you could increase the black output level so that it equals the highest RGB value to avoid crushing it, though:

[ect5150]

So how is it these guys can get this result?

I would imagine that the film there has aged just as much as DBZ (same era anime there). But the colors on these BluRay sets are fantastic!

Spoiler:

[MarcFBR]

So how is it these guys can get this result?

I would imagine that the film there has aged just as much as DBZ (same era anime there). But the colors on these BluRay sets are fantastic!

A few things.

1- Ranma used better quality film stock.
2- That specific film has not degraded.
3- Pony Canyon (and Kitty before them) stored the content properly.

We have no idea if 3 is true or not for DBZ. But the other 2 explain it anyways. There are a few other reasons, but those 3 work well enough to explain. Not to mention that color fading can be corrected. The fact they did just a few years ago and Toei was disinterested in doing so over a decade ago for very different products leaves a whole host of reasons of why one was done and not the other.

[ect5150]

It might not matter, but I made this script to help out with color issues for anyone using AVISynth. Please note, only use videos with normal resolutions (DVD stuff should work fine, 720x480 or 640x480). I didn't proof it against small videos (they crash) and I didn't even test it with 1080P content (although, it should work for those). If you are using AVISynth, just resize it before you call the function anyways. Just put RGBParade() into the script.

Code: Select all

function RGBParade( clip input ) {

    videorgb = input.ConvertToRGB().TurnRight()   
    r = ShowRed  (videorgb, pixel_type = "YV12").Histogram(mode="classic").Crop(input.height(),0,0,0).Greyscale().Overlay(BlankClip(color=$880000,height=input.width(),width=256), mode="chroma")
    g = ShowGreen(videorgb, pixel_type = "YV12").Histogram(mode="classic").Crop(input.height(),0,0,0).Greyscale().Overlay(BlankClip(color=$008800,height=input.width(),width=256), mode="chroma") 
    b = ShowBlue (videorgb, pixel_type = "YV12").Histogram(mode="classic").Crop(input.height(),0,0,0).Greyscale().Overlay(BlankClip(color=$000088,height=input.width(),width=256), mode="chroma")

    rgb = StackVertical(r,g,b).TurnLeft().PointResize(320,256)
    vectorscope = input.ConvertToYV12().Histogram(mode="color2").Crop(input.width(),0,0,-(input.height()-256))        
    parade = StackVertical(rgb,StackHorizontal(BlankClip(rgb, width=32),vectorscope,BlankClip(rgb, width=32))).ConvertToRGB()
        
    return input.height() < 512 ? \
        StackHorizontal(StackVertical(input,BlankClip(input,height=parade.height()-input.height())),parade).ConvertToYV12() : \
        StackHorizontal(input.ConvertToRGB(),StackVertical(parade,BlankClip(parade,height=input.height()-parade.height()))).ConvertToYV12()   
}

It will generate an RGB Parade and a Vectorscope, which is something Photoshop seems to lack. Here is an example from the title sequence. It has an awful lot of red, and then with the colors adjusted--

Spoiler:

Here is a video of it in action as well.

[fdsfgs71]

I tried not to be so drastic with the color tweaks this time. Thoughts?

[kei17]

Sorry for necroposting, but I wanted to tell you guys that Toei's official streaming service has hundreds of authentic cel scans that are very useful for color correction.

http://taod.jp/pg/600001?page=6&sort=2&order=ASC
http://taod.jp/pg/600002?page=4&sort=2&order=ASC

[lansing]

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.