Adywan, first off, there's nothing malicious about me posting in another SW forum about this, since your edits get discussed there a decent amount anyway, and it's certainly not my fault that you can't register there. I don't have any leadership role on SD.net at all, period. I'm sure there are threads discussing your edit on many other boards out there, and (shock!) some of those folks may even be members here.
I'm sure the SD.net denizens would love to have people from here register to go talk to them about this and many other topics. That'd be sweet!
When I spoke about CGI models I was joking, but considering what you had going in ANH:R, I'm not so sure it would be a bad idea. What would it do, add a couple of months to the development time?
Now then:
I'm not saying that everything in the movie must be the exact color of the model (sadly my DVDs aren't on hand atm, but that shot is from the 1997 SE, and we're assuming that's the original Executor model in the shot, even so, it deserves to be blue, dark and scary!).
If that were so, then yes, we need to turn the sabers into white rods and so forth. No, I'm saying that the intention was always to have BLUE TIE Fighters. So you had both blueish models and blue tinting. There was never an intention to make them gray, this was done in the first movie as a concession to not getting the effect right (sort of like how painting the lightsabers was done because the original effect sucked and was such a hindrance, though in the later movies it became the norm).
So this is one of those changes that is being done as a "deliberate creative decision" (which is your right as your fan edit, of course) but not a case of fixing something Lucas screwed up. You yourself admitted at one point you would do them blue, except that it's too time consuming... in which case I'd say, just get somebody to do the TIE masks for you, but I imagine nobody is volunteering to help you out directly these days.
So your objection is NOT that changing the color of things in post-production is bad, only how it was done... but then you say it's because you just don't like the idea of TIEs being blue... ?
Ady, my point in posting those pics was to show examples of the TIEs we've been talking about. It's not "silly" it's a demonstration. If you want my opinion, the second mockup I posted, middle TIE, is what I think looks the best, and closest to how it ought to be.
The one on the left (sorry if I didn't put big block letter labels in the jpeg what each one was, I tried to explain it below) was the gray TIE how it looks in ANH untouched, and how YOU want the TIE to look in your finished ESB:R.
The middle one is your "ideal" pic, how it should look... if it were blue, "properly done."
The one on the right is (as per your explanation of the "post production colors") how you say it looks in the 1980 film.
You say they were made blue only in post-production? That doesn't jibe with the models I've looked at. The models were a blueish color for ESB, different from the white/gray models used for the original Star Wars. The blue was merely boosted in the movie itself in various places to make it look brilliantly blue.
The first mockup I posted then would be how the two TIE MODELS looked respectively in ANH, ESB, and then the third on the right would be how they look in the movie NOW (according to you).
The second mockup trio shows what happens when you boost the blue. Boosting the contrast makes the blueish model look brilliantly blue, and the "tinted overlay" look terrible. I'm suggesting that going back to the blue-gray models and upping the Color Saturation (I mistakenly referred to it as "contrast," pardon me, in Photoshop7 it's the "Hue/Saturation" adjustment and I just increased the saturation) a bit will make them look fine. I'm not sure how the blacks and whites will turn to blue just because of that, but maybe you know something I don't?
Lightsabers trivia (none serious):
Well, since red (or pink) isn't anywhere CLOSE to blue, I don't think it's just a "weird inking" thing. The old faded comics look a bit pink, but the point is, the sabers were all reddish in the original Marvel Comics run.
I should correct what I said though, because (iirc), Luke's saber is suddenly blue in the ESB issues, and then green for ROTJ, but in the first run (around the time of the first movie's release, and leading up to ESB's release, they were all the red hue).
To InvisibleWolfMan:
At least you didn't go here:
;)