Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Looks like some crushed whites in the new ones. Hmm, maybe the term is more properly "slightly blown".

I have tried to carefully push whites as high as possible without clipping, and I had to sacrifice just a very very little. I think it was worth it considering it looks like the bright parts are more "even" now.

Here's what photoshop reports as clipped. (Not the exact same frame but the same scene.)

I think me pushing the whites so close together creates an "illusion" of them being crushed more than they actually are.

TServo2049 said:

I was looking at that newest Tantive test. It looks better than the original timing, but the problem with a lot of the pink/orange flashes and stuff like that is that it looks like they actually dialed down the highlights (and pumped up the saturation?) on those specific parts of the frame. Whereas the GOUT has clipped whites, a lot of the flash frames and explosions in the '04/'11, have almost *no* whites. Areas of the blaster-impact explosions that were highlights in the older transfers look almost indistinguishable from midtones in the newer ones, and look almost too colorful in relation to the rest of the image.

Unfortunately, that's something that an overall setting for the whole movie can't fix, it seems. So I guess it's up to whoever is making a preservation to edit the explosions frame by frame.