[In progress] Big Trouble In Little China (1986) [Project: Celluloid — Regrade]

[LucasGodzilla]

Hello everyone, just wanted to post that I am not dead but have been merely very busy lately. My free time, simply put, is dwindling so I don't get as many opportunities to work on my projects, however I do want to give a status report of sorts with the creation of this thread.

I've been hard at work for the past few months trying to regrade the European master of Big Trouble In Little China (with many issues arising, forcing me to restart from scratch essentially three times) and I thought it'd be a nice tease for what's to come as well as a means of getting feedback as I am currently pressed with a little issue of sorts.

I'm currently trying to determine what'd be a better approach for this project, attempting to recover more details in the shadows and highlights at the cost of lowering the image contrast and mood to a certain extent or present a regrade more true to the 35mm source I'm working off of (which still holds more details in both ranges I may add but less explicitly).

Higher Contrast | Lower Contrast
 

 

Which would y'all say is better?

I think the higher contrast looks fine on my display, but I seem to find that the rule of thumb is that usually when it looks good to my eyes it looks too crushed to someone else's.

I'm also curious to hear how it looks to those who've seen the movie projected as the saturation has been unintentionally boosted after altering with the regraded footage in Resolve to boost shadows and retain some highlight detail (as the straight LUT crushed and clipped a lot of data given the print source's original contrast), leading to a lot of scenes with richer blues than expected (with a fair amount of gamut clipping in some areas that I'm certain will be pulled back on the encoding stage through some AVS limited palette commands; I've also already applied a bit of saturation compression in Resolve to help).