the skies on Tatooine are blue because the skies on Tatooine (Tunisia) ARE blue… They’ve been desaturated on home media (especially in the UHD) but have always been and meant to be a deep and bright blue…
If they’ve been desaturated on home media, does that not imply that they’re meant to be desaturated? You may as well show us pictures of Mexico City and claim that all the Hollywood movies that give it a yellow color grading are wrong. At that point, your complaint is with color grading itself, not the artistic intention behind it.
By home media I don’t mean every single release, just the UHD. Even the 2011 BD has had the correct sky saturation, though the hues and other colors were off in that release. Also the original SD version of revisited also suffered from desaturation due to Ady’d at that point undeveloped cc skills. The sky color in these comparisons is correct. I should know, I’ve spent the past 10 years color grading Star Wars, (as you have also been) and you as much as I who’s worked on many film prints, you always get that deep blue when you dig deep enough. It’s supposed to be like that. Toning it down would make the sky appear darker than it should be…
My color correction project used the 2011 BD as a base and the Technicolor print as its target, and I very much disagree with the assertion that the 2011 BD had the correct saturation. The BD was heavily oversaturated in its primaries of Blue, Green, and Red (undoubtedly an issue stemming from Lowry’s process), and it was a constant battle to tame these oversaturated colors. The skies on Tatooine were one such problem area. I settled on a much lighter and more subtle blue for the skies, in keeping with the Technicolor references.
The method I used for taming the skies wasn’t specifically targeted at them, however. I used a LUT that I had developed to adjust all the colors across the film equally, before going in and fine-tuning for each shot, and the LUT performed well in fixing the oversaturated blues across the film (such as in blue lights, sabers, engine glow), not just in Tatooine’s sky. This LUT took months to develop, testing and retesting so that it wouldn’t cause strange color shifts or go too far in areas. This helped in bringing the entire film back to a neutral state without the wild but consistent oversaturation of the 2011 BD.
My point with all of this is that nobody should be using the 2011 BD to weight their opinions of how Star Wars should look. Its problems are well-known, and my ‘defense’ of the home-media versions is just that you can’t point to set and environmental photos to claim that this is the intended look of a color-graded film. Color grading is what turns Tatooine from a place in Tunisia into an alien world, and it’s important to use the film (whether that be film prints or home media releases) in order to know what the artistic intentions actually were. We can disregard the BD or at least attempt to correct for its clearly erroneous colors, while still attempting to divine the artistic intention for Tatooine’s color grade based on the film and (to a far lesser extent) its home media releases.