Sailor Moon Color Correction

[JunoDX]

me too

 

[Seen2]

I've watched the trailer of your project.

Oh wow, this is amazing. It's always been a dream of mine to see a color-corrected release of the 90's anime!

 

[Joaco95]

eric posted this on his fb page and damn
Siempre me ha gustado mucho la parte inicial de la primera variante del ataque de Sailor Moon en su forma eterna. Todos esos sparkles y luces de colores.... | By Sailor Moon HD | Facebook

 

[tuxmask]

I'm also working on a color correction project of the Italian DVDs. My project will be better because ESRGAN has inherent frame continuity issues because the AI isn't aware of what comes before or after each frame. My project consists of manual color grading using Vegas Pro. Color correction consists of three phases: white balance, hue shifting, and curve correction. This, in combination with proper encoding, will lead to the best result possible. In addition to my profile picture, here are some examples of the white balancing work done so far: SM | Slowpoke Pics If anyone is interested in helping here are some tutorials:

11 episodes have been white balanced so far. Any help would be appreciated because including the specials there are 205 episodes total to correct. Collaboration is necessary for this project to succeed. Send me a pm for a server invite for the project after you've watched the tutorials.

 

[lansing]

It must also be said that sapphire has upscaled in the slowest and least optimized way
Someone made a comparison between a normal and fast model on a GTX 750 TI. With a 480p video, the upscaling speed was 0.04 fps for a normal model and 0.93 fps for a fast model
And there is another way to make it even faster (docker)

Any update on the project. Recently I started to get into playing around with the ESRGAN upscale. There are 2x or 4x upscale models in the community database. The 4x doesn't work well with old anime and very few 2x work gives enough sharpness comparing to your samples.

 

[julayla]

Honestly, I think you and this youtuber called Eric McCloud are my miracle when it comes to how the upscaling of Sailor Moon is done right AND with color corrections

 

[tuxmask]

Honestly, I think you and this youtuber called Eric McCloud are my miracle when it comes to how the upscaling of Sailor Moon is done right AND with color corrections

Because of frame continuity issues, it's not done right. Not only that but what is used to train the model has inconsistent colors.

 

[lansing]

I was playing around with color correcting sailor stars and I found that the dvd or blu-ray version impossible to correct. The saturated color has all been crushed to black and cannot be restored.

This is a color comparison on the first episdoe between a denoised dvd version and a cel color version I quick painted in photoshop. Notice the blue on the uniform, in the dvd version, it has been darkened so much that it became black. There is nothing can be done.

sailor stars dvd vs cel color - Imgsli

Does anyone has the laser disc version to see if it has better brightness?

 

[CorzaMoon]

I was playing around with color correcting sailor stars and I found that the dvd or blu-ray version impossible to correct. The saturated color has all been crushed to black and cannot be restored.

This is a color comparison on the first episdoe between a denoised dvd version and a cel color version I quick painted in photoshop. Notice the blue on the uniform, in the dvd version, it has been darkened so much that it became black. There is nothing can be done.

sailor stars dvd vs cel color - Imgsli

Does anyone has the laser disc version to see if it has better brightness?

That's overly bright... Only her eyes were painted with pure white paint. The rest, such as the school uniform top is supposed to be an off-white, and same with the hair reflections. The blue in the uniform is supposed to be navy blue, towards the purple spectrum. As long as you get rid of the overall pink tint (in this episode's case), then the rest of the colours look more natural, especially the skin.
Ep #167 Colour Correction - Imgsli
This was just a quick edit in Photoshop, but you can see the differences.

 

[lansing]

That's overly bright... Only her eyes were painted with pure white paint. The rest, such as the school uniform top is supposed to be an off-white, and same with the hair reflections. The blue in the uniform is supposed to be navy blue, towards the purple spectrum. As long as you get rid of the overall pink tint (in this episode's case), then the rest of the colours look more natural, especially the skin.
Ep #167 Colour Correction - Imgsli
This was just a quick edit in Photoshop, but you can see the differences.

That is what the original cel color looks like. The hair highlight or white on the school uniform are also white, as stated in the model sheet.

http://imgur.com/z4RGi9O

 

[CorzaMoon]

That is what the original cel color looks like. The hair highlight or white on the school uniform are also white, as stated in the model sheet.

http://imgur.com/z4RGi9O

I guess when the promo stills colours look very similar to the DVD, we assume that was the colours they were going for, especially when the blue looks nothing like what was used in the colour sheet.

http://imgur.com/8fJSDTZ

 

[lansing]

I guess when the promo stills colours look very similar to the DVD, we assume that was the colours they were going for, especially when the blue looks nothing like what was used in the colour sheet.

http://imgur.com/8fJSDTZ

The camera/scanner used to capture this cel was clearly not able to capture the saturation.

This site provides a more accurate representation of the cel color, as it pretty much matches what I have from my scanned color chart:
Luna-Art Cel Gallery - Sailor Stars Series

 

[tuxmask]

The camera/scanner used to capture this cel was clearly not able to capture the saturation.

This site provides a more accurate representation of the cel color, as it pretty much matches what I have from my scanned color chart:
Luna-Art Cel Gallery - Sailor Stars Series

Cels are a good color reference in addition to broadcast video captures. Model sheets are also useful. If anyone wants to help with my project, it would be very beneficial, as everything will be finished faster with more people. Encoding will be used to fix the chromatic aberration and inaccurate display aspect ratio of the Italian DVD release. White balance, hue shifts and curve corrections are the three parts of the color correction process. So far, 17 episodes have been white balanced, with almost 18 done. Once white balancing is done, everything else will be less tedious, since white balancing is shot-by-shot while hue shifts are generally per episode. Here are a few examples of what's been done so far: sm white balance examples | Slowpoke Pics (remux is used currently, encode will be done when color correction is complete).

 

[tuxmask]

Currently 20 episodes have been white balanced. Here are 25 examples of the work done so far: SM - White balanced | Slowpoke Pics If anyone wants to help, send me a pm.

 

[ChibiBoi]

@Starlight @sapphire91

Upscaling a video is very easy. You just need to install a few stuff. And copy/paste a command that will use a model on the frames of the video. Then you just have to wait the end of the process.
The problem is that my hardware is not good enough to upscale a video. My gpu is REALLY bad

The reason I posted my results here is to ask for help. If a lot of people are willing to help the whole series can be done quickly whereas it would take more than forever for one person. I'll share the model and then people will just have use it on the Dynit DVD Remux. There is no need for special skills, just a good gpu

I don't want to go too much into the technical aspect but this model was mostly a "proof of concept". I wanted to see if I could get good results with esrgan. The model I trained is slow, I don't think it's realistic to use it for a project aiming at upscaling 200 episodes. That's why I plan to use the results of this slow model to make a much faster model (the quality would be a bit lower but the speed difference is huge)

I want to help! Can I do this on a Mac?

 

[lansing]

A few weeks ago there was a seller on the Japan auction site who was selling color design sheets of Toei animes, including some Sailor Moon. I was not able to grab one becasue they were out of my budget. Fortunately, one of the sets has been brought by people on setteidreams and they have shared it on their site. Their sheets has all the color model of the main sailor senshi and their school uniforms as well as the general color shading table.

I took a few models and tested on the Japanese DVD episode 1, and they looked pretty good.

https://imgsli.com/MTg3MTYx/0/1

 

[sailormoongalaxy]

What is this tendency to want to erase the grain? Everything is smooth, and all the details are gone...

 

[Onuzim Ima]

Is it only me or do some of those Drafts make them look a little chubby (Not that it's necessarily bad, of course)?

 

[lansing]

Is it only me or do some of those Drafts make them look a little chubby (Not that it's necessarily bad, of course)?

The images were straight out of the DVD, I didn't bother correcting the display ratio

 

[journeyin2mystery]

Hi, this is my first time posting on this site so hopefully this post is ok. I've started work on a Sailor Moon project that involves upscaling the Italian DVDs, (with software superior to what Toei used) manually cleaning up dirt/damaged frames and adding film grain to replicate how a proper scan would look.

I'm curious as to what people think about this, especially the color correction process that I've based off the cels/properly remastered movies. I've made an album to showcase the colors for episode 1 here: imgur.com/a/R1jlGP9 I'm just curious if I'm on the right track before I waste my time.

Love your upscaling to HD...and what you can do is impressive. Yet...I like it without the color correction myself. The show played around very much with lighting, and mood...and it generally seemed to be golden hour/twilight for long periods of time. The daylight (and moonlight) was another star of the show...especially in the early seasons. I like the warmth and feeling of the original colors, which make up the iconic sailor moon palette of golden warm tones, lavender, and more.