“Elf” 4K UHD - Are Reviewers Blind?

[Zack Birlew]

Hi, everybody, so I picked up the new “Elf” 4K UHD Blu-ray after seeing some reviews on YouTube and seeing the new HDR color grade. The thing is, I thought that there was something wrong with their upload settings or some YouTube compression issue because the new UHD color grade they were praising was terrible!

Now confirming what I saw with the UHD in hand, it looks like someone took the original color grade and jacked up the red channel to the point of making grey splotches on faces and sometimes even to the point that it looks like they did selective color just on the reds. I’m watching the snowball fight right now and it’s so uneven that it goes from blue rocks to orange rocks as it cuts back and forth from shot to shot. I know there are movies that go after the orange and teal skin tones but “Elf” isn’t one of those movies and it’s as if whoever did the grade tried to force it into that style. The obvious sign of this mishandling is the muting of green and blue and over darkening of colors in general in the North Pole scenes.

The brightness is also off balance as the film’s brightness is overly toned down in general as you can see in the mailroom scene playing as I continue to type this. I can just about see into the turned on shop lights hanging above the characters, I don’t need to see that detail, I would rather clip the shop lights to give more brightness on the actors, it’s ridiculous!

This is a great example of UHD HDR done wrong and why I think they need to go back to the drawing board on HDR mastering practices overall. The goal shouldn’t be to highlight maximum detail in an image, it should be to highlight the actors and create images to further the story and if HDR can help balance out the image then by all means give it an HDR remastering but I think it’s clear we all need to come together and say that it shouldn’t be overdone or done solely to spec because then you’ll get off results like this. If a film balances out and looks better with only a 10 percent boost of HDR without looking unreal then that should be acceptable but as it is, it just looks like everyone is trying to make every film fit in a 95 to 100 percent HDR grade irregardless of style, design, or creative decisions.

Am I alone in this or are the reviewers just mistakenly jumping on board the HDR hype train without consideration?

EDIT: I just threw in the included Blu-ray with the previous HD grade and other than perhaps adding a slight boost of saturation and contrast for the UHD format, the movie would have looked perfect! Such a miss!

 

[Marc Wielage]

How is your monitor calibrated? What specific monitor are you using? It's always possible (however unlikely) that your display is either creating the problems you're seeing, or it's grossly exaggerating real problems in the transfer.

Elf was released by New Line, which I believe is owned nowadays by Warner Bros. In general, I think Warner Bros. does very good work with their Blu-rays and 4K Blu-ray releases, and they generally match the previous director-approved version, while going a little more in dynamic range with Dolby Vision (or HDR). Jon Favreau is a fairly A-list director these days, and I'd bet he had to approve anything they did for final color.

 

[Zack Birlew]

I’ve looked at it on a new LG 4K HDR television, an older 70” HD Vizio, my 4K HDR computer monitors, my Panasonic Broadcast Color Monitor, and my iPhone 11 Pro Max, I can tell you, it’s definitely the movie! I would doubt Jon Favreau would have approved this as the mistakes in the grade should be clear to anyone but you can’t depend on that as not every director or producer is involved in the release of every home media version of their films. Check it out for yourself and see, the movie in UHD is a red and orange mess.

If there were a problem with my displays then any of the various other 4K UHD Blurays that I have would have looked funky, especially when watching on an SDR display. So far, "Elf" is the only one that looked very off and it would be unreasonable to recalibrate every display just for one movie. What was curious is that different Youtube reviews seem to have different colored footage, almost as if they modified the color or spliced in shots from the HD Bluray, much like the 4K UHD trailer of "Elf" seemed to do as there seemed to be resolution differences in some shots.

 

[Marc Wielage]

I’ve looked at it on a new LG 4K HDR television, an older 70” HD Vizio, my 4K HDR computer monitors, my Panasonic Broadcast Color Monitor, and my iPhone 11 Pro Max, I can tell you, it’s definitely the movie! I would doubt Jon Favreau would have approved this as the mistakes in the grade should be clear to anyone but you can’t depend on that as not every director or producer is involved in the release of every home media version of their films. Check it out for yourself and see, the movie in UHD is a red and orange mess..

OK, so, let me ask again: how were your monitors calibrated?

 

[Zack Birlew]

Okay, Blu-Ray.com even mentions the red and orange issue:

 

[Ryan Sims]

Well... being a red head myself, and similar complexion to Will, I can see how this could go bad fast with a high color grade. It probably did look fine on calibrated monitors at the studio, but that's not how most of us are going to watch it. The other thing that comes into play is make-up. I'm going to guess that Will's make-up worked fine in the film projection era, but starts to look uncanny valley when seen now in such detail. Just look at my avatar here to see how my face looks here and I'm not wearing make-up.

 

[Zack Birlew]

The makeup could factor in too but in this case we don't see rosy cheeks on Santa, his whole face is rosy! That's what's so strange to me is that the HD Bluray, other than the "bad transfer" reviewers mention about it, looked pretty much fine but was maybe a little too bright and/or low contrast for its own good so just a good 4K transfer and slight adjustment was all that was needed but instead they tried to make the whole thing look like a dimly lit Christmas string light movie, I should know as we did that effect in my award nominated film school short film, "The Christmas Valentine", which is on the Babs Do Productions Youtube channel. However, they clearly went overboard on this grade for "Elf" and I can only hope that a future release adjusts the grade back towards what the original version was and the HDR should look good and balanced regardless of whether you're watching on an HDR TV or regular SDR TV set.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Well... being a red head myself, and similar complexion to Will, I can see how this could go bad fast with a high color grade. It probably did look fine on calibrated monitors at the studio, but that's not how most of us are going to watch it.

OK, case closed. End of argument.

 

[Ryan Sims]

I love all your comments Marc on this site! Thanks for trying to keep Reduser honest, at least on color grading.