Hey guys, I’m a sort of new guy here in a sense, though I’ve posted here and there for some time and been reading the forum since years ago.
The recent years I’ve become interested in home cinema calibration and related things, which brought me into color correction. I’m not at all anything close to professional in these things though, but I have many years of photoshop experience.
When I rediscovered this forum a couple months ago, I was instantly amazed at the work many people here are doing to preserve the original trilogy. I saw that since there’s no high-res source of the movies with intact shadow details, people have been forced to base a lot of stuff on the HDTV versions. I’ve been fiddling around myself in photoshop with some raw screenshots of the HDTV versions but since they’re compressed by broadcast, the shadow detail has suffered.
Now that the Blu-ray set was released, I thought I’d do that again and this time, since there was not much compression, there was also slightly more shadow detail. I went into photoshop and made a curve file and some settings using “selective color”, to try and dig up some shadow detail and make like “one setting for the whole movie” to remove the largest color inaccuracies and tints etc. I also tried to correct the underexposed look of the SE’s. (Only tried with SW so far)
Now, I know that at least Harmy has gone through this kind of thing, using the HDTV version as a base. (Totally love your DE versions Harmy) I found out that Adobe after effects could use both curves and selective color, so I took the raw Blu-ray file of SW and did a render using my settings.
The reason for this thread is not that I want to make an own preservation, but maybe “help” others by posting my settings.
Note that my monitor is not displaying 100% correct colors, and that I, like everyone else, get a bit colorblind after looking at these things for a while. That said, skin tones might not be all correct, but at least it’s not as much “lobster-man” now. After I post the settings, maybe others with better eyes can improve them even more.
Finally, sorry in case my grammatics is not perfect, I’m swedish after all…
EDIT: New screenshots! These shots represent the latest avisynth settings which you can find in post 3. They are the exact same shots as the ones in the screenshot thread. They were rendered using the built in imagewriter plugin in avisynth.
