negative1 said:

here's a better comparison of the shots

gout on the top, frame below:

in our shots, the lighting might be off,

there's a lot of grain, and there is no

color correction...

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These shots look so terrible on film because they were comp'd too many times resulting in an increased graininess and a much softer picture. Hence why they look super bad when Lucas wanted them smoothed over in the 90's to match surrounding shots better. For the special edition I *believe* they went back to the original film elements before being comp'd and did it digitally. A long story short; I don't think this shot needs to or even should look too much better, the fact that you've got it pretty much how it originally looked is great I think!

BTW if you wanted to post a clip or two some time I'd love to have a play with it in AVS and see what could be done with it. :)