You_Too said:
This is what came out when I took that shot into photoshop and let it auto-find the RGB mid-levels and adjusted it to that without changing the white or black balance:
Nice regrading there You_Too! It's like a lighter version of Harmy's screencap. The thing is, to me, just like with Harmy's version, the flesh tone is too 'normal' in this particular scene IMHO. I don't know how reliable the GOUT is as a source of regrading, but luke's warm flesh tones don't seem to fit with the extremely cold environment he's in. The whole scene just looks a little too warm and reddish IMO.
Perhaps that's why LFL decided to make it so blue in the 2004 dvds and blu-rays, to try and instil a greater sense of sheer coldness in the scene that it lacked before. Excluding the issue of which brightness is 'correct', I get more of a 'colder' feeling in my screencap, reflected in Luke's bluer 'colder' flesh tones, than I do in this one with Luke fleshtone being redder and 'warmer'.
Colour grading has got a lot less subtle over the years, so perhaps it did actually look like the GOUT when it first came out theatrically with a lot more 'neutral' palette but when LFL had the chance to regrade it again, they decided to follow the more modern trend of showing temperature more explicitly via colour grading? This is totally hypothetical of course but if this was indeed the case, which colour grading is the more 'correct' or 'valid' one, the original theatrical one with the far more subtle colour grading or the recent 2004 masters following more modern colour grading trends of showing hot or cold via colour...
Ultimately it comes down to what one's own colour grading preferences are, I suppose, whether you like more neutral palettes or more strongly graded palettes. The original theatrical fellowship of the ring colour palette comes to mind as an example of this later type of grading, where many locations feel different due to having their own unique colour grading. I personally like this type of stronger colour grading more so I see this sort of colour revisionism that LFL has done as fairly acceptable but i'm sure that the majority here with a more purist leaning will completely disagree with me. I'm not trying to recreate the GOUT/theatrical colours in this project (Adywan and Harmy are doing that much better than I possibly could with their fantastic releases) just remove the blue tint running throughout the three films on the blu-ray releases, brighten them up a touch and remove all of the bad changes made by GL to these films since the theatrical releases. I don't know whether anybody would be interested in such releases but if they are, I'll be happy to upload them.