Yes, I forgot to say how much I like the regrade. The "Jesus wept" shot looks suitably horrific in your regrade whereas it just looks cheap and fake with the BD colours. I'm not overly keen on the blown-out highlights though. I know that it would likely look this way on a 35mm print but, by that logic, you should be crushing the blacks too as the BD has far more details in the shadows than a print would show.

My personal preference would be to keep the colours but adjust the levels so that no detail is being lost.

Yep, blown-out whites are "good" in a way that resemble better a film, but bad because the loss of details; maybe raising up the gamma could do the "trick".

I completely disagree with you guys about the blown out highlights. I don't see any actually clipped highlights, as far as I can see they are merely compressed/flat, as they would be on film, in a very organic way. No detail seems to be actually lost. Making it darker/uncompressing the highlights would lose a lot of the (in my opinion very intended) look.

The nun shot is a good example of the blown out highlights, there's definitely noticeable detail there lost. Maybe contrast could come down a little, might help with the grain too. Overall though it looks a lot more atmospheric than the original master

Sorry, I don't see it. The highlights are flatter, as they would be on film. Maybe your display has weird settings that clip it? If you zoom into the PNG, you can clearly see that the grain is still fully intact in the bright areas.

If that doesn't convince you, maybe a look at the histogram will:



There most definitely is no clipping whatsoever, just a flattening. Incidentally, this flattening also helps reduce the grain in the highlights, which is a plus if you ask me.

It doesn't matter whether the detail is technically 'there' in a histogram or with your face pressed up against your monitor. This is a visual medium hence I would argue that it should be visible to the eye under normal viewing conditions.

Ah. Well now I see your point.

Personally, I only have a problem with actual clipping, as "blown" highlights can be used as a stylistic element with perfect validity in my opinion. Detail is of course "lost" in the sense that it isn't as apparent to the eye, but it's still there in the sense that the picture doesn't just turn into a giant even white blob in that area, but still has an organic texture to it.

And I would argue that seeing every last wrinkle in her bright t-shirt isn't really that important here, especially since it's meant to recreate the look of the print more than anything.

Yes, absolutely. If the goal is to recreate the look of a 35mm print then there would be less perceivable detail in both the highs and the shadows. My own preference would be a best-of-both approach whereby we have the theatrical colours but all the visible detail of the BD (perhaps a little more contrasty as the BD looks very flat) but both approaches are valid and obviously the decision is not mine to make.

After looking over the feedback garnered yesterday, I shall look into turning down the highlights in some areas. If there are any specific shots that you see that is "overblown", please tell me since from what I can tell it's only the daylight segments where the issue is prevalent. I may also tweak the night-time scenes' highlights since it looks a little too bright as well to me in retrospect. Please note, I will not turn down the highlight for the Cenobite-Hospital sequence (outside of fixing the artifact I noticed) since it's intended to look like that as you can tell in the original scanned stills (most likely to not only add the supernatural feel of the scene but to also draw attention away from the makeup).

For the fixing blacks issue, I'll definitely look into that issue as well. After some further test stills TomArrow made (thanks again mate), I can tell that there'll be some complications with this. We decided to check two of the most extreme colored black still we could immediately find (the two Hospital-Cenobite stills) and the results are mixed to say the least.


As you can see, it screws with the colors too much in these scenes. Because of this, my current plan at approaching this is to leave certain areas alone to keep the intended blue-look intact but to fix the issue in areas where the blacks appear almost magenta-ish or in just more natural-looking segments.

Finally, I'll look into making a DNRd version of the current Turbien / Arrow master and then blend it with the untouched master to have it cleaner than before but still retain the grain and texture (just not as heavily). TomArrow recommended checking MVDegrain so I'll probably look into that sometime in the future. If anyone has any recommendations for a de-grainer / noiser or just a general approach to making the newer master, go ahead and shoot.

Anyways, that's all I have to say really. I'll quickly restate my proposition that if anyone has any alternative / "superior" audio tracks of the movie that they want to see added in, please tell me or send me a PM. I currently have a couple of extra audio tracks outside of the Arrow 2.0 stereo (like the 5.1 track in English and German, the Polish DVD 2.0 track by Mr. Brown and the crappily dubbed laserdisc track spoRv lent me), but I'm not planning on adding them in since I don't suppose anyone would care for any of them.

Levels in the first image are too compressed; reinstating them helps with black-ish somehow:



second image (in avisynth): 


(just made "on the fly", you could try to lower the gamma as well, from 1 to 0.9 or 0.8)

P.S. Hystogram is your friend!