The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition Color Restoration

Hello to all fans of the Peter Jackson’s trilogy!

Unfortunately, all official releases of The Fellowship of the Ring suffer from many problems.

Theatrical Edition (2010)
Digital noise reduction, artificial sharpening.

Extended Edition (2011)
Ugly green tint, loss of detail in highlights and shadows.

Remastered Edition (2021)
Digital noise reduction, black and white flashbacks.

I have created more than 4000 LUT files to restore the colors. I used the Dr. Dre’s Color Matching Tool, Adobe Premiere Pro with the Voukoder plugin, AutoOverlay AviSynth plugin, MeGUI.

44rh1n said:

Dwalin used my grades of the extended scenes, but went even further by completing a shot-for-shot regrade of the rest of the theatrical footage from the extended Blu-ray as well (unlike my release, which uses the theatrical Blu-ray for those scenes).

I haven’t watched it yet, and I haven’t done a side by side comparison with the DVD yet either. So I can’t yet verify the integrity and consistency across all of its shots. But a quick scrub through of the film looked pretty good to me! (There are a few shots that I noticed have some banding and other compression artifacts though.).

I think it’s really cool that there are multiple restorations out there now! Hopefully Warner/New Line will see our demand for a proper release!

44rh1n’s release:
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/44rh1ns-The-Fellowship-of-the-Ring-Extended-Edition-Color-Restoration/id/61952