In some ways, I'd say it does resemble an atrocious DI, "brute-force" CC, but in reality, it's actually pretty localized. There's no question that someone just cranked the saturation up on a ton of stuff - things like R2-D2's blues, most likely trying to get his completely different ANH-paint formula to match the brighter tones of later films. But also, there are shitloads of super-saturated reds in the film. Lots of lobster people, and lipstick wearing men. And then there are all the glows that were eaten off by Lowry's algorithm. That's a well-known drawback to his methods, by the way, versus doing it frame-by-frame by hand. His algorithms tend to eat the glints out of people's eyes and glow and haze and a bunch of stuff.

In any case, the way I've been getting back to the colors is through a LOT of rotoing, or clever use of remapping colorspace to get finer control. It changes from scene to scene. For example, I might take a scene and remap the colorspace from RGB to HLS so I can bump the saturation without adding artifacts, or compensate for created artifacts. That is, I can extract just the saturation information (or saturation for a specific range of color), and perhaps blur it a touch before (sometimes after) a levels adjustment. Or another thing I've done, when I've had to roll a color temperature around, which undoubtedly creates new artifacts, is isolate those artifacts either by color or finding them in an isolated channel in a different colorspace, and re-applying the source compression to just that channel, recovering a "non-distorted" version of the new color.

Lots of tricks like that, plus some custom software tools keep me artifact-free, while having near-DI control. And like I said, a LOT of roto work. As for the shadow detail, sometimes it's actually in there, and if you pull it out, you have to deal with all the resultant noise you generate, but you totally can. In other cases, I will use bits and pieces from other transfers, to enhance another plate. For example, I might isolate a range of colors from a 2004 scene, and apply them in a sort of transfer to an earlier transfer. But again, you have to do a lot of colorspace remapping to isolate aspects of the image, and then reapply. But you have almost limitless control.

_Mike