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As a hobby project, I am looking into how difficult it would be to regrade the Buffy HD releases to match the colour grading of the original. I haven't done much colour correction in the past at all, so I have very little experience to draw on. I'm running into a curious situation, where different parts of the same frame seem to be graded differently. Here's a shot of Buffy wearing a white shirt, and in each of these samples, the HD source with my filters is on the left and the right is the unaltered UK DVD release:

Decent match on the face, but the shirt is completely different Decent match on the shirt, but the face is completely different

I am fiddling with White Balance, Curves and Lift/Balance/Gain in kdenlive, and I'm finding I can make the face match, or the shirt match, but not both at the same time. The shirt wants to be more blue while the face wants to be more green/red. Is there some sort of nonlinear filter I can use to get this effect, or, I dunno, was the original done by actually applying different functions to different parts of each frame?

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  • Applying different adjustments to different parts of the frame is fundamental to color grading. I don't know anything about kdenlive, but if it doesn't do that, use something else. Also, video scopes are 100% necessary, non-negotiable.
    – Jason Conrad
    Commented Aug 20, 2020 at 2:32

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First off, I recommend you use davinci resolve for grading (it's also free). There are two options that you have, you could either draw a mask on the part you want to affect, track that mask to follow the motion and apply the grade only inside of that mask. Second would be to pick the colour of the area you want to change and only alter this spectrum, which can lead to artifacts, especially when not working with original files tho.

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  • if you 'wanted' to use black magic software, fusion 8 is the much better choice for what the OP is trying to do. And masking specific segments isn't at all viable given the sheer amount of footage.
    – kite
    Commented Apr 3, 2019 at 3:47
  • Resolve is better at getting through lots of shots quickly. Fusion is good for precision keying, which isn't always necessary. And with Fusion inside Resolve, you can feed the keys to Resolve. The Viewer LUTs in Fusion are also pretty broken, especially for ACES, unless you use OCIO, which basically bypasses all BMD color management. And I say this as a huge BMD fan.
    – Jason Conrad
    Commented Aug 20, 2020 at 2:26

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