faded-eastmancolor-enhanced.avi
I've been mucking around with complex colour filters in "Avidemux", and seem to have stumbled upon an effective technique to restore a semblance of half-decent colour to some extremely faded old Eastmancolor 16mm prints (pre 1982!!)
Basically get your friendly film shop to do telecine transfer to DVD, rip it to hard disk, crop all black edges, deinterlace, resize to something sensible anywhere from 640x480 down to 384x288. (we're talking PAL video here in Australia: 25fps, 720x576 interlaced DVDs, though if your video transfer technician can do progressive scans that would be preferable)
Then the fun starts, here is an updated filter chain that gave worthwhile improvement:
1. Mplayer hqdn3d (defaults)
2. Avisynth colorYUV (autowhite)
3. Mplayer eq2 (Contrast: -1.00 Saturation: 1.25)
4. Mplayer Hue (try about -45.0)
5. Mplayer eq2 (Contrast: -1.00 Saturation: 1.25)
6. Mplayer hue (try about +62.0)
A source movie with a strong magenta hue in the highlights will have green added by step 2. Step 3 will reverse the image to create a pseudo-negative, and (with luck, YMMV) you may be able to use step 4 to subtract any false colours from what would have been the shadows and dark areas in the original image. Note that success can only be judged by looking at the final image after another "flip" of light and dark in Step 5.
Step 6 is best to pick a human face and fiddle with the hue settings until facial tonings look realistic. In my case the shadows were quite bluish, but still a vast improvement on the original, which honestly could have been mistaken for a B&W movie in many scenes.
If you can get any semblance of realistic green colour from grass, tree foliage and astroturf, you are doing extremenly well: the best one can expect from badly faded films like this is a dull grey-green...
A more impressive example will be uploaded soon.
A cheap LCD screen on a laptop is probably a major handicap, and best subjective assessment of colours would be with a calibrated CRT screen in a specially lit room.
The manufacturer's web page still blames inadequate rinsing after fixing, too much heat/humidity in storage, etc etc so it's always the customers fault these old movies look so crap, apparently.
Some people claim if these old films had been kept permanently in a fridge for 40 years, the colour would still be fantastic, but I read somewhere that Martin Scorsese was threatening to sue Eastman-Kodak if he had to keep reprinting his negs so often, and presumably he always rinsed well, and stored in a cool, dark, dry place ;-)
Copyright National Film Board of Canada 1968 - and this sample is presented here based on educational and "fair use" criteria.