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Help Wanted: Mos Eisley matte painting - best colour corrected image.

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 (Edited)

Hi,

I’m an artist based in the UK. I’m making a large scale acrylic painting on canvas (3m wide) that refers to the original Dante’s view matte painting of Mos Eisley, made by Harrison Ellenshaw. You can find a dreadful low-res reference of the painting here (https://obsidianarchitecture.com/blog/2015/11/24/star-wars-in-death-valley-mos-eisley-overlook).
I need to find a ‘correct’ version of the image that is faithful to the original '77 version, preferably in HD.
I use Photoshop and I’m familiar with colorimeters, colour profiles, etc so would eventually output to a industry standard print house. It’s the faithfulness of the colour that’s most important to me in taking this project forward.
Can anyone help, even if it’s a screen dump form the Despecialized edition? I’d be much appreciate this, thank you.

Best wishes and thanks.

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Here you go - this is from v1.0, with no Digital noise reduction, sharpening or color correction:

Imgur

And here it is on the DNR version, color balanced, sharpened and with less noise:

Imgur

No guarantees that either of these are the “correct” or “actual” colors as they appeared in 1977 when projected, but hopefully it’s a better image than what you currently have to work with.

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Apparently better than the version Ellenshaw himself had access to for his talk at the Academy last week, where he talked about his matte with an image from the SE.

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Here is a slight upgrade for the frames williarob posted.
This is three consecutive frames with and without noise reduction. Three frames allows you to stack them if need to extract the highest quality combined image.
The colour is 4K77 v1.0. Colour accuracy is debatable.
They are anamorphic so you will have to do a 2:1 horizontal stretch to properly view them.
They are 16bit, 3734 x 3164 pixels anamorphic. Stretched will be 7468 x 3164.
I cropped the sound track and sprocket holes but is otherwise uncropped.
It is Technicolor sourced.

Hope this helps.

https://we.tl/t-7NO69YiA65

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Thank you Williarob and oohteedee,

Just amazing help from you both. I think that’s probably as far as I can go in terms of accessing the best scans unless a decent 70mm print becomes available.

I feel for Harrison and correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t the SE showing a new matte that isn’t his work?

In terms of colour balance, the only way I can see a clear way of getting a correct colour timing on ongoing upgrades is to work alongside someone who understands how the film stock degrades chemically and retrace its decomposition (I’m aware there were many film stocks used for different shots before the transfer to a final editing that various stocks were used for distribution) back to its original state. I’m sure the bods at Kodak, etc have drilled down far enough to understand film stocks original state. In the same zone of conversation I just saw Apollo 11 on Imax - boy those 70mm shots are absolutely astounding. Please go see.

I may post up my other reference photos when building up my painting and expand further.

Any more thoughts and again, thank you gentlemen.

Paul:)

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And thanks to double05 and Hal 9000 for the interesting comments, too.

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As if by magic I see that there’s been a very recent screening of a 70mm (perhaps a UK) print at the Academy in the last few days. I’m sure if we asked nicely they’d be happy for us to borrow it for a little while, said on-one, ever, ever!

Ah well, perhaps someone is testing the water for a fan reaction or hope, hope, hope, a rerelease?!

https://comicbook.com/starwars/2019/07/01/star-wars-special-edition-original-screening-70mm-rare-lucasfilm/

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Paul Harraway said:

As if by magic I see that there’s been a very recent screening of a 70mm (perhaps a UK) print at the Academy in the last few days. I’m sure if we asked nicely they’d be happy for us to borrow it for a little while, said on-one, ever, ever!

Ah well, perhaps someone is testing the water for a fan reaction or hope, hope, hope, a rerelease?!

https://comicbook.com/starwars/2019/07/01/star-wars-special-edition-original-screening-70mm-rare-lucasfilm/

Yes there is a whole thread for that

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/70mm-print-of-GOUT-on-Saturday-in-Academy-Theater-in-CA/id/68191

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Thanks timdiggerm,

If only I wasn’t in a galaxy far, far away. Well, a country … Cheers.