The DP of Rogue One Greig Fraser mentions that they had a look at the 4K versions of Star Wars AND Empire in the February issue of American Cinematographer:
“With Gareth Edwards, we wanted to be attentive that the look be consistent with A New Hope, which is seared in our brains. We weren’t necessarily trying to reproduce what it actually looked like, but how we remember it — there’s a difference between reality and the remembrance of reality. Part of our research was to look at the 4K scanned versions of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. They look fantastic, but they don’t look how I remember them.”
Not sure if that means that more digital nonsense has taken place with the movies.
I’d be more likely to guess that he’s meaning the ‘colour grading’ is very different to how he remembers…
I doubt that very seriously. Color grading is not something most people outside of this forum care about.
DPs care a whole lot about color grading actually. He easily could have been talking about that to some extent.