Alternative Methods for Digital Color Restoration

Modern cinema has several technical standards and tools that aims at reproducing it through different devices and through time. This is not the case of the analog cinema from the past, even if recent. When someone has to face the restoration of an aged film, usually no color reference is available. Even in the rare case of having some information about film characteristics, the film aging depends on so many parameters, like e.g. humidity and temperature of conservation, that no reliable model of the color fading can be used. As a consequence, we cannot properly use standard color management tools in the restoration pipeline. What is done actually is restoring the frame by visual inspection, as main criterion of assessing the final results. This means that we operate in a “subjective way”. Thus, the restoration process “simulates” what we suppose could have been the original color. Then this is viewed in a new (modern) projection environment, in terms of gamut and overall balance and contrast. Starting from these considerations, the talk will present an alternative approach for color and contrast processing in the digital restoration pipeline, able to lower the amount of supervision time required.