Future generations will look back and wonder how those old pixels faded over time.
The original was desaturated on the orange, but heavy on the teal, so the saturated version is super cyan.
Yeah. I’ve seen this video so often on the internet and it’s becoming infuriating. Their edit is certainly different, ~maybe~ better than the original (I disagree, FWIW). But it’s really not good, and definitely not the real, original colours. Toss it into an image editor and you can see in the histograms how they’ve really amateurishly and lazily done things. On a similar clip to the above, all the shadows and so most of the contrast is basically gone, and a lot of the highlights are washed out to pure white.
That is some really crappy looking color “enhancement.” It’s like they saw a slider for amping the saturation and slapped that bad boy all the way to the maximum.
Normally, when someone hands it to you straight, you take it, and you thank them.
Yeah, not a very good color grading job. Weird skintones are the worst to me.
I guess you can’t really “restore” all the color information from the already highly processed finished version, compared to finding the original ungraded images and working from that.
Terrible color grade job- blown highlights, lack of contrast, etc etc.
You can’t put back what’s not there- it’d be like taking a stereo recording and trying to push it back to multichannel. No dice.
Doing color correction well is really, really hard. And wildly time consuming.
And this isn’t that.
I think that’s not the point. It’s meant to be different, not better, and succeeds at that. Are you surprised an amateur uploaded something to Youtube that’s not professional Hollywood quality?
I liked the narration. so snarky. I didn’t enjoy the heavy compression. Color Grading can be used to make the picture seem more detailed.
Unfortunately, the footage I’ve seen was vey smeary. There’s really no way to evaluate skintones, for example, if there aren’t any pores left behind.
So very difficult to define what “original footage” is.
- If it’s captured from Blu-Ray, for example, the images are trimmed from the 12-bit DCI P3 color space of theaters to 8-bit REC 709, with a restricted color gamut and a different gamma (lit room versus dark theater).
The colorist changed the theatrical version for the home deliverable so it would look decent on the limited color space and bit depth of HDTV. - If it’s viewed on a monitor, then it’s likely in sRGB, which is not what the blu-ray grade was meant for, and will look different than the original intent.
- If it’s captured from youtube, then god knows what happened to the footage, from compression, sub-sampling, transcoding, etc…
Color is a science, and each grade is made to perform well in a specific environment.
I think video labs naively meddled into something a bit more complex than they thought. I don’t think it’s as much malice as just lack of knowledge,
Color is a science, and each grade is made to perform well in a specific environment.
And Science says:
Teal and Orange are your new Gods. Worship no other gods before them!
Ah - there’s science and art; two very different things!
Science will give you consistent and predictable results.
Art will give you aesthetic results, meant to solicit a range of emotions.
So it’s the current artistic trend you dislike, not the science behind delivering this look in a consistent way 
This isn’t a Hollywood quality color restoration. No one said it was one. It’s an evocative taste of how things could have been, and it’s a plea for Warner to do it better next time. Most of the comments in this thread seem to entirely miss the point.
Ever since the coen brothers discovered color grading, I feel as though their films have been lacking a certain realism.
Super Cyan does battle with Acer Platanoides a/k/a the ‘Crimson King’
Their films? I thought the Coens did it great (in Oh Brother Where Art Thou). I don’t recall them doing Superman.
Any random moron can make something different. Better is the whole point.
You’re right, I don’t know who these ‘VideoLab’ people are, maybe it’s just one guy in a basement discovering colour correction for the first time. But I don’t demand Hollywood quality, I never said I did. I demand that you don’t lie about bringing back the original (“Restored” colours? Really?) colours, and if you are to make a bold claim about how Hollywood should make films, and try and dazzle us with sciency looking graphics with histograms, you show us something with a bit more effort put into it.
The video does mention very unambiguously they “restored some of the film’s natural color”
I’m not arguing against their opinion of the original heavily processed color grade, just saying that their heavily processed color grade fails to live up to what the audio says about their work: it may or may not qualify as a “restoration”, but what matters is that the end result doesn’t look (to me) at all natural, cheerful, or in the classic spirit of the Superman character and visual history.
I mean, just look at it.
So maybe most are not missing the point after all, they’re just making a parallel point to the one you bring up.
