TServo2049 said:
Harmy, I get what you're getting at, I don't think it's supposed to be THAT bright, but in the various bootlegs and other sources I've seen, the sky looks a little brighter and has a little more color in it, and the foreground seems contrast...ier?. In yours, the contrast still looks dull (though some non-SE/non-GOUT images, like the Topps Widevision card, look like that too).
Here's the Puggo Grande, which is what Corellian's mockup reminded me of. Obviously, the sky is too blown-out:
And I keep coming back to Moth3r's version of the '77 widescreen boot (even though the color gradiation of the horizon doesn't really register in this transfer):
Also look at the clip at the beginning of From Star Wars to Jedi - on the Japanese LD transfer, it doesn't look overly bright or blown-out, and even though the sky looks a little too bluish in the Luke closeup, the first shot seems "right"...
If anything, please fix that blood-red sun. It's supposed to be orange, and it is not supposed to look as saturated, sharp-edged or opaque as it does in the '04/'11 transfer. Right now, it seems to pop out from the background - it almost looks like it's pasted over the sky, whereas it used to actually look like it was in the sky.
That's not exactly how Puggo Grande looks though, your example looks very familiar to how I boosted the brightness on it in an example in this thread here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-Colortiming-Cinematography-was-What-changes-was-done-to-STAR-WARS-in-93/post/429548/#TopicPost429548
This one is untouched:
The same goes for Moth3r's bootleg which looks very different than his original source material it was made from:
Just thought it was important to point it out. Anyway, I actually think it's near impossible for Harmy to make this sequence look like the original scene, not only must he treat it like a special effect as it was digitally messed with in '97 and '04 but the color grading is also so screwed up here that anything he can do to improve it is an major accomplishment in my book.