Yeah. It’s not like I’m comparing ANH to the other OT and PT films, or to American Graffiti, or the Star Trek films, or classic color films. Or even modern films. No, I’m taking ANH as an isolated case and completely ignoring all high quality source materials to help me calibrate the colors and ignoring on set lighting. And it’s not like I have been calibrating my TV and monitors for over 20 years. And it’s not like I have been restoring faded photo for the last 25 years.
Sorry, but one look at the skin tones you achieve and lack of color depth and it is pretty easy to see you have overdone whatever effect you are after. My early color correction efforts went the same way to try to get rid of the lobster man effect, but when I compare the blu-ray of this shot to all the other shots, it is not nearly as bad off as you claim. You praised the JSC while at the same time saying the blu-ray needed to be darker when it is already much darker than the JSC or any other of the home video versions (and on all of them you can see the garbage mattes you aren’t supposed to see). You are advocating a heavy handed correction and so many of us have done that and found it to be grossly in error and we are trying to share our collected wisdom with you and you are blowing us off. Calibrate your monitor. Recheck your references (and for goodness sake, don’t use bad scans of printed images… find higher quality scans that are not so obviously skewed by the scanning process - remember I have done photo restoration for a living and know about not only calibrating monitors, but scanners as well).
The problem with ANH is not any one color or brightness issue. It is a slew of them. The big issue is that what we are dealing with now was not scanned by a professional colorist. We have several of those working with the 35mm film prints of Star Wars and many other movies. Just check out the Technicolor scan of Song of the South. It does have some issues, but the colors are vibrant and well balanced. This site is full of talented people who know what they are talking about and you can learn a lot if you listen.
Sorry to be so hard on you, but you are basically saying all the pros are doing it wrong. The pros are using calibrated monitors and professional level hardware and software. They have excellent references and have tools to help restore the original colors by clues on the film itself so they can counter the fading time has caused. Not to mention a huge amount of experience actually doing it. I have some issue with how some are handling ANH, but that is because I think the Technicolor, while not suffering much from fading over time (why that type of print is so good) suffered from some bad handling as Technicolor closed its shop and is not a good representation of the original colors for the general release. DrDre’s work on recoloring the 4k77 release is amazing and looks better than any other recoloring I have seen.