Asaki said:

But then again, I'm of the opinion that a lot of you guys fuss and fret about the colors far too much. Especially when we have so few original colors to compare to, you'd think something like low-fade film stock would be "the source", instead of trying to tweak everything to look like the blown-out VHS sets we grew up on.

If you are talking about watching a projection of a 16mm film, then I would agree that the colors would be "source". However, if you're talking about capturing that digitally, it's a different ballgame. A video camera doesn't always interpret the colors how our eyes see them. You have to set the white balance, brightness, etc. during capture, and often what you get digitally comes out different, and you have to tweak it back to what your eyes saw. The camera is simply a different and much more limited device than our eyes and brain, and most people don't realize that until they start doing some serious photography or film digitization.

This is why I was careful to ask Adywan (and he luckily was eager to comply) to limit his adjustment to finding a single adjustment applied to an entire reel, so that the original balance of colors from scene to scene remains largely original. But without tweaking, the white balance on PG and PSB would be way off, unecessarily. In the case of ROTP, it was so easy to get a good white balance (compared to PSB), because of the nature of scenes available to work with, that the initial captured colors are surprisingly good. The only one that appears noticeably off to my eyes is the one with Vader/father at the end. A bit of purple reduction would help, and thus needs to be done evenly throughout that entire reel to ensure that all the scenes were colored as they originally exist. I think Adywan would do a better job on that than I would.