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. There's some color in the last half-reel, but the color has faded almost entirely from the first three. This material is uncensored.This is usually considered a black and white film, because it has only been circulating, in English, in a censored public domain black and white cut. You could be forgiven for thinking that these reels are also in black and white, but there is some color information visible- the occasional splash of green. Leveling the material shows that yellow and blue are mostly missing, with skin tones becoming silver and purple.
(Note the color card at the beginning - yellow, magenta and cyan. It's faded to no longer resemble that.)
The following images are Photoshop mockups of what the film should look like, which I am using as reference for further restoration. It doesn't look like this yet, but with some editing trickery the goal is to get it to look like this. I have "cheated" in these mockups by including some color from standard definition sources, which are more cropped and censored by comparison. Mixing the two sources carefully in Photoshop, I create a reference for future work.
I can compare the two stills and build a color model in DrDre's 2015 Color Matching tool. This creates a LUT (Look Up Table) which I can use for color correction in After Effects (or other programs), although the results are imperfect since the desired color is often not there anymore on these reels. It is, however, a step in the right direction, and combining a few such steps will improve the material considerably.
I am trying a few different techniques here, including cropping both images to their key areas, and shifting the hue by 30 or 60 percent, to get different results out of the color matching tool. It is likely that I'll render a few different versions of each scene and combine them.
In my Photoshop mockups here, I have used Topaz Gigapixel to upscale matching stills from a color version of the film, and Mesh Warped that version to match the 4k film. I've used a mask of the image's brightness (in the Channels tool) to matte out the darker portions of the image, which lack color (and adjusted brightness levels on that matte to my taste). I then combined color from both sources, with some tweaking by hand. I can do this with the film as well, although it's more difficult since the SD source is cropped by comparison, and is missing some of the uncensored scenes that appear here. So I also need the LUT method to work as much as possible, perhaps combined with more traditional leveling.
The color is very faded here, so the color matching tool may find it difficult to differentiate between different shades of the same grey which are supposed to be yellow or pink or blue. Some of the results are grainy and a bit limited. However, there is a certain amount of color still present on the reels in some form, which is not visible to the eye. Bringing this out is just one step in a larger process.
The professional program Nuke has something similar but superior with MatchGrade, and has something similar but superior to EBSynth with CopyCat.I did a restoration of this film recently called The Pink Flamingo Cut, in standard def. It's in color and in English for the first time (apart from two sequences), with some uncensored scenes included from lower-quality VHS, or colorized.Three of these four half-reels have very faded color, but if I can solve that problem they're uncensored and in English, and in high quality 4k. The title song "Too Hot to Handle" is an uncensored edit, as is "Turkish Delight" and (mostly) "You Were Made For Me." No cuts to VHS.Famously, they censored the title song in the black and white version by animating clothing over Jayne, at great expense. (They also zoom in and cut to the audience to avoid showing her lower body generally.) Before doing that, they reedited the sequence to use a lot more closeups, which is what you see in the German version. This uncensored version is almost identical to the French cut, but has one additional shot. It's mostly wide shots and was clearly the original intention, while the other version was the coverage, making Jayne seem unaware of where the camera is. She knows where the camera is in this version.The third of the reels seems a little better than the rest, as Johnny sees the trashed Flamingo Club and Robert investigates Lilliane. I'm noticing that the color is a little more responsive here. The latter sequence is in English here for the first time, and is one of two Robert/Lilliane sequences in German in the current cut.