Phil Clark has scanned, in 4K, four half-reels of film from the rare 1960 Jayne Mansfield film, Too Hot to Handle, which I restored in SD recently. 37 minutes total. The first three are very faded colorwise but there's some color in the last one (seen here), with the tradeoff that it's a more censored edit. It includes Jayne's song "You Were Made For Me," except for two short sections, and a censored/more clothed version of a backstage scene with Cynthia, and Lilliane's "Monsoon" performance. While initially this seems to be pretty faded, leveling and color correction reveals that this half-reel still has pretty much all of its color present, and it looks great.The other three half-reels are a tricker problem, and will be their own post.The material was rendered from Cintel frames in Da Vinci Resolve, at a slightly lower resolution than was provided, but within a 4K frame. (I would have gone larger if allowed.)
As a proof of concept, I corrected the RGB levels in Photoshop, to see what was possible with the material, and then did the same in After Effects, and also made notes of my settings so that I could recreate them in Premiere. In both cases I started by doing a simple contrast reducing trick, in which the image is duplicated on another layer as a Multiply layer, using itself as a matte/mask (so that the darker areas of the picture are matted out). The result darkens the highlights of the picture, which tend to be blown out in black and white and faded material, and were certainly faded here. I rendered this version before doing any leveling. I repeated the process on the more blown-out sections involving Cynthia and Maureen.In this half-reel the Red channel needed the most leveling, which is typical of this sort of fading. Underneath that, most of the original color was present.
Additionally, I used my Photoshop proof of concept comparison frames to create LUTs (Look Up Tables) in DrDre's 2015 Color Matching Tool. This becomes much more important for the three more faded half-reels, but may be useful for this half-reel as well.