I have a few questions: what was the goal regarding the color grading? In the 4K77 blog, there are videos of both Technicolor prints, (the one Lucasfilm and Mike Verta has used and the cleaner one with worse colors), and the latter one was the main source for 4K77. So the idea was to mimic the look of a typical/ideal Technicolor print, or one of the prints used for 4K77? In which context (when screened in a cinema or dark room with 70s bulbs, in a bright living room)? I am curious about the blacks here (specially in many space shots), was it a limitation of the print used or what? I’m not criticising 4K77, the restoration looks amazing and for me it’s now THE version of Star Wars to watch, I’d like to know the technical details if it can be shared.
A single correction was made for each reel. In most cases it involved nothing more than white balancing the image using the optical track for the white point and then adjusting the contrast so that the brightest point on the reel is right at the top of the scopes and the blackest right at the bottom. With a single adjustment like that, you can’t make space or the end credits completely black or you will crush the blacks in other parts of the reel.
Colors and levels could be greatly improved with a shot by shot grade, but I wanted to preserve the original colors and levels as much as possible for this version. So the colors quite accurately represent the digital scan of the print, which isn’t necessarily the same as when projected in a dark room with a 70s bulb, but nor is it anybody’s idealized imagination of what it should look like.