Chewtobacca said:

... what I have long suspected: it's impossible to color-correct the EE BDs satisfactorily.

Thanks for bringing that up! :) After I threw that well-deserved ripe tomato at PJ, I wondered if something could be a satisfactory solution.

Color correction cannot fix crushed color. I checked all 3 color channels and only Red was crushed (indicated in it's bright color), Green & Blue were not.

snicker's demonstration of injecting other channel(s) detail into the damaged channel area (see his comments in http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/New-colormatching-script/topic/15002/) is a real solution. It necessarily requires significant manual adjustment on a per shot basis, though.

Color correction alone can be a mostly-good fix. Red is crushed in it's 1-70 luminance range -- yeah, I know, ouch! But if this now 0 area is raised up to 8 or more (to be balanced where it would show the most, for example, on skin tone), it helps fill in that color gap.

So the top picture (TFOTR theatrical edition) was damaged into the center picture (TFOTR extended edition). After applying this color correction, the resulting bottom picture looks pretty good. However, originally crushed areas (mountain shadow, darker sky) will remain somewhat red-anemic.

<-- histogram fix

Histogram low input high input low output high output gamma
RED             0              192            8                 255              0.9
GREEN         0            220            8                 255              0.8
BLUE            0              204           16              255              0.75