Originally posted by: Knightmessenger
The problem is, if to me they appear more digital rather than film, it clearly isn't more OT feeling for me. I've seen episode II so I will probably recognize most color alterations. I believe an example of a not so obvious one is the "Ani, is it really you" was slightly desaturated. Even if I wasn't familar with the film, I wouldn't want any scene that screamed: color alteration! I HATE films that make you go "Ooh look, the color is unnaturally adjusted. See everything's blue to show this scene is moody and depressing." Real subtle.

Lord of the Rings took me out of the movie on the first viewing with that crap. And even though I hadn't seen Empire and Jedi in full, I knew something just wasn't right the very first time when I watched the 2004 dvd's. I strongly feel color correction is a very difficult deal and that it is very easy to make something look far worse even though you think it looks so bold and great. I'm not really referring to Trooperman here. I frequently adjust color/contrast of digital photos I take and I'm now I look back at some "enhanced" photos and think "man I did that so wrong." I saved all the original images smartly. As the X0 project has shown, proper and accurate color correction are very hard and time consuming, you can't afford to gloss over it.

This is a good point and I'll keep that in mind. I have made a lot of color alterations and there are a few scenes I want to go back to and tweak the color on- the droid factory, the balcony scene (very difficult) and the Obi-Wan/Dooku "Join me!" talk, which I think I went overboard on. The nightclub I really think has an older feel now.

I agree with what you said regarding the Lord of the Rings movies- the color correction was so, so bad on those, and it varied wildly from scene to scene, apparently to match the intended "mood". The 2004 Star Wars DVD's were also awful.

However, I feel that Ep. II is a different story. The first Star Wars shot entirely in HD, I think that radical methods were necessary to get it to feel natural. It is widely agreed upon that AOTC looked like garbage in the first place. According to cinematographer Oliver Stapleton, "when the first Digital Star Wars came out it looked so terrible that the industry was really shocked – especially after all the hype. The irony is that the next one looked OK (not great but OK), but it was too late – the damage was done by the first one."

The droid factory in particular is cited by many fans as being the worst Star Wars scene ever. With the bright, garish colors and the whole CG look to it, I'd be hard pressed to argue. So I did change that a lot, darkening and recoloring it to make it more dramatic looking but also to cover up how fake it would look were it brighter in there. Maybe it is too purple in there, maybe the contrast is too high. I can play with that. And yes, I desaturated the scene you referred to Anakin and Padme. I've pretty much desaturated the whole film because whether it was the camera that they used, or the process, or what... the saturation is just way too high (I think).

My color corrections are more to the end of making the CG less obvious and to give an older feeling to the movie than to force a "mood" upon the audience, as the Lord of the Rings films did. I hope none of the scenes in SOTDS go that far. I did change the funeral- now it happens at sunset. And the argument afterwards happens at dusk. That was definitely a creative decision- it was more dramatic to have it at sunset and I think it really improves the scene along with the new music. I've done a couple things like that, but if I could, I would have gone back to the shooting and fixed the problem there, because that's where a lot of the problems are. Practically everything's fully lit, brightly colored, and flat looking all the way through the movie. By eliminating that feeling and adding some grain to the image overall, I really think it's an improvement.

The good news is that after this comes out, if there are specific scenes that bother anyone color-wise, I can very easily go back, tweak the colors, splice it back into the master file, and it will show up in the next "release". I think as a whole, the film looks much more natural and less digital than AOTC did. I know people will realize the colors are different than AOTC- hopefully they will like this better