For me the only good thing of the entire remastered box is the really beautiful color regrade.
Apart colors, all the rest is plain 2k Upscale + outlaw DNR + Sharpening fraud.
There are plenty of screens (capsaholic and BR forum) so atrocius i can’t believe someone had the courage to ok it.
There is someone with the idea of regrade from the TE bluray with the UHD as reference?
Sounds like you actually need to watch it in 4K HDR before landing on this opinion. Haha.
It’s not upscaled 2K, except for the VFX. Everything else is true 4K, scanned from the original negative. That’s also why it’s so clean. Sure, there’s some DNR, but nowhere near the amount of DNR in other film releases (cough cough James Cameron cough cough). And it doesn’t even come close to the amount of DNR on the original theatrical Blu-ray. Plus, LOTR always had digital sharpening. It’s part of how it has always looked. Sharpening is even talked about in the color grading BTS in the appendices from 2001.
The HDR looks really great on a true HDR display, like my LG OLED. I definitely recommend checking it out on a true HDR screen, preferably one with Dolby Vision support.
My only complaints so far are that the DNR could have been done a bit less, and the color grading could have been a bit more similar to the original DVD release (with the added HDR, of course). Some scenes are less warm from the original grading (Rivendell), while others are warmer than the original grading (flashbacks and Galdalf’s confrontation with Saruman). And skintone/midtones seem to be a bit more lifted overall in bright scenes than in the original grading. I also noticed some blues in Gandalf’s beard during his scene with Frodo at the beginning of the film, which looks like a stray qualifier of the sky. Kind of annoying. Reminds me of the stray power window that used to be in this exact same scene on the old green-tinted Blu-ray. But that’s me nitpicking! Without comparing it to the original grading, it’s quite good.
Granted, so far I’ve only looked at Fellowship. It’s a vast improvement from previous official HD releases. I still have to look at Two Towers and Return of the King, though.