[In progress] Hellraiser (1987) [Project: Celluloid]

[LucasGodzilla]

Those discolored highlights are a known (at least to me and DrDre) problem with DrDre's tool. As you discovered, one way to deal with it is to adjust the pre-LUT luma/RGB curve in the highlights just before the artifacts begin to appear (you can use a similar method for somewhat recovering highlights when matching to a reference with blown highlights by compressing the highlights curve pre-LUT, and then using a post-LUT curve to expand the highlights again). Another way to improve on it is the 2-pass method I described earlier. So you would basically take the graded shot, like yours with the green bulb, then paint over the green in Photoshop so it becomes white, then run it through DrDre again.

Thanks for the advice. I will most likely just tweak the highlights at the end of the day though since I find way too many of the shots to be way too bright anyway, probably due to the Arrow transfer since they cranked up the brightness in some areas a little too much, so simply adjusting the curve will likely do the trick.

I wish JohnCarpenterFan had some stills of the outdoor / daylight segments because I'm sure the problem would be averted for the most part since this problem is most frequent in those segments and would help provide those missing highlights as you mentioned (And the finale feels off in-terms of colors since I've seen it much bluer in some snippets–such as in the trailer Turisu posted back–but for all I know those could be false so I'm not going to adjust those without a true reference). But hey, I'm happy with what I already have.

My current plan all-in-all: Do the regrade like before, make a second-pass grade for everything, then adjust the highlights and see how it looks from there. I'm hoping with that second pass the highlights issue won't be as big of an issue since there actually are a few areas in the scanned stills–🔍such as this–that should provide the missing highlights.