Update on the Jayne Mansfield film (Too Hot to Handle 1960). Previously, I used Photoshop to create corrected versions of frames from Phil Clark's 4k Cintel film scan, using some color from another source to show how they would ideally look, if the film hadn't faded.
I compared these two versions using the 2015 DrDre Color Matching Tool, and saved them as LUTs (Look Up Tables to alter the color). Some didn't load for some reason.
Out of the rest, I picked the best two for each half-reel of the film, and I'll render both in After Effects and average them.
I will then, maybe, noise reduce the result. The first reel (pictured) has more problems and might benefit from more attempts. It's certainly going to be noisy, but I've coaxed a lot of color out of it regardless, more than I anticipated. You can see it struggling to interpret very similar greys as flesh tones or blues or so on, and the result is some noise, which may be removed with NeatVideo later.
As a test, some of the LUTs were made by shifting the Hue of the whole image by 30 or 60, so that the blind spots of the faded film would fall into a different color range. I found this useful for the first reel, although parts of the color range look strange - a sudden shift to green in the darker areas, in this case, which I'll have to key out.
But even one pass with a pretty rough LUT gets us close to the desired look, with that caveat. These are all actual results from the faded source without cheats or other material used.
The first three half-reels are uncensored, and the fourth has pretty much retained its color. The third of the bunch is pretty good too, although the ungraded version looks almost exactly like the first reels, with maybe a little more blue.
Chris writes:
I've been an admirer of your restoration work for years. I'm starting an independent home video label and wanted to ask you, based on your experience, what softwares would you recommend for film restoration?
My reply:I'll admit I'm a little out of date, still using older software, and some free software, to avoid paying subscription fees. I do get programs which don't use that pricing model.
So my toolkit contains older versions of PFClean (much older) and Adobe CS6, as well as Izotope RX8, Topaz AI Gigapixel, and EBSynth (free), as well as older versions of NeatVideo, the Rife App (which is very outdated, I think Waifu-Gui-Extension outdoes it) .... VirtualDub2/AviSynth .... DrDre's 2015 Color Matching Tool (free) ....
NukeX has a 30 day trial and has the AI source matching tool CopyCat, but I hear they're pretty litigious.
I think everyone uses Phoenix now and I wouldn't know how to get hold of that legally.
So this means that my workflow has a lot of brute force in it, doing cleanup in Photoshop the old fashioned way, or with the older PFClean's dirt fixes.
My own restoration work is generally not about the software but about how much time I am willing to put into removing the most obvious problems and damage.
The stuff that people use these days, like Phoenix, is much more advanced but you pay for that!