I've always done some contrast tweaking to the sabers in my edits. There have been so many complaints about the sabers in the 2004 DVDs and honestly they don't bother me at all. But I know people complained about them and wanted to see changes made, so for Empire and Jedi I raised the contrast, and made the red sabers more red when I felt I could/should.
I did absolutely nothing special to the sabers for this version of Star Wars, which matches what I did in my 1.0 edit. In my 1.0 edit the picture was brightened already, so the sabers looked fine, I think I might have raised the contrast a bit in the Obi-Wan/Vader fight.
In this edit, maybe I should have done some special processing to certain shots in the Obi/Vader fight, but I just gave them the same basic color correction I'd done to every frame of the movie.
There were two shots where I wanted to restore the sabers to being white -- Luke training aboard the Falcon (first shot only) and the last shot of Vader after the Obi-Wan duel. So I used chromakey in the first case and GOUT footage in the second to restore them to white.
I do think the sabers look good in the Obi-Wan/Vader duel, that's why I posted that screen grab. There are one or two shots where the contrast is low enough that Vader's saber acquires that pink hue people hate, and I should have done Chromakey contrast fixes on those actually. I didn't think about that enough, since I thought the whole duel looked quite good with the color correction (which certainly helped the sabers get their bright white back).
Yeah, I think it looks good. Better than version 1 certainly!
The crawl is from the GOUT. The Lucasfilm and "Galaxy Far, Far Away" titles are new, based on screen grabs from various versions to look as good as possible.
I've been reminded why, as proud as I am of my "de-specializing" work, I shouldn't really post video samples online. On the web, people analyze screen grabs and video samples to death and make up a million problems that aren't actually there and don't exist and wouldn't bother anyone even if they did.
Whereas, when people see the actual DVD, there could be a million problems with it, and they wouldn't notice, just say it's great. (I've made huge mistakes that weren't caught for months - the first Star Wars Classic Edition and Deleted Magic are full of them - and been fooled by advance word on many fan discs that turned out to be poorly-authored.)
I find both those responses silly.
There are also people who are better at creating little web samples than they are at creating or releasing an actual DVD, and that's silly too.
I don't think there are any real problems with my DVD, and I'd rather not have people brainstorm with all their might to come up with some based on little web samples.
However, I'll continue to respond to any of your worries with my usual honesty.