Dragon Ball Color Fixes

A friend just showed me some Dragon Ball movies. I really wanted to download some quality 1080p DB movies since what he showed me was filtered a bit too much....

After I arrived home I checked what was the situation of different releases on Dragon Ball and found out that the best quality was supposedly the Funianimation blurays. I searched for some more comparisons and also found that the DragonBox releases despite the inferior resolution had better levels and colors overall. The bluray release had crushed blacks, too much contrast, saturation and overall not very accurate looking colors. Still i wasn't too fond on the DragonBox colors, being a bit too dull and green cast overall so I run some color tests to see if I could bring it somewhere in between, more precisely to the Dragon Ball Kai scheme which in my opinion is the best color I have seen for Dragon Ball so far (probably need to check more thoroughly though).

Personally I think that a very good DVD release (such as the DragonBox) has nothing to envy to a not too great bluray release (as it happens with old material like this). So I'm actually thinking on doing some automated restoration of the movies, that is, use a template for slight denoising (I want to preserve some grain texture none the less), stabilization and color correction. I think this could be something worth the effort.

Following an example of the color correction work (original images supplied by Tanooki):

Funinamotion Bluray:

DragonBox:

DragonBox only brightness:

DragonBox Color Correction:


I would expect someone spouted "hey dude, you only raised contrast/brightness", because of that I uploaded a "only brightness" correction so you can compare what differs to the color correction version. To note is that I almost didn't clip any colors (100% is imposible once you touch levels), everything is still there although a bit more compressed, notably in brights where some tones might be too much compressed. My explanation for this is that a transfer is "that", a transfer, on the process some dynamic range is lost, and you are either going to conform with dull tones or accept that some tones are going to be compressed when color correcting.

In my fix the green color cast is reduced as some yellowing in the midtones as well. Although almost no saturation is added, color was shaped to show more prominent in shadows, which is one of the first things that are lost in a transfer. Following some more comparisons:

http://compare.bakashots.me/compare.php?setId=1682
  
* This post only applies to movies, which were mastered or preserved much better than the series.

Polemic:

BakaBT deleting the BakaSHOTS comparison as usual.