Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released) — Page 126

I did some fooling around in Picture Manager to try to replicate the fading, contrast/blowout and slightly desaturated look of Puggo Grande, as well as skewing the color a little blue (to match the slightly bluish white balance), and here's what I got:

Compared to the actual PG:

Obviously, I'm not asking you to make it look like PG, I'm just showing that I was very easily able to take your version and approximate the way the scene looks in PG without much tweaking of the color balance. This particular scene doesn't seem to be particularly faded in PG, the biggest issues seem to be contrast and saturation. Taking the slightly more blue temperature of the PG transfer into account, and leaving the differences in contrast, saturation and luminance aside, the color balance seems to match.

I'd bet that when that print was new, and viewed on a projector rather than a video transfer, it would have looked pretty close to your newest version. It's obvious that the color timing of the scene has moved further and further away from the original with every successive transfer.

I like the colors, I like the sun ALOT, but is there any way to get the sharpness of the skyline and where the hut meets the sky back? The edges look blurry, and even more so around Luke.

The slightly aqua cast of the first shot is how the glow looks on the Blu-ray. IIRC, Harmy took the glow from the Blu-ray and matchmoved it with the core from the GOUT.

mverta said earlier in this thread that the original color timing looked warmer than we're used to - can we even be sure that the blade showed up as cold a blue on a cinema screen in '77 as in the bottom pic? In the clips in The Making of Star Wars, the blue glow looks a bit warmer (even with the slightly colder bluish white balance of the Japanese LD transfer of that documentary).

g-force - I noticed that too, I think it has to do with Harmy adjusting the sky separately from the foreground, is that blur covering the "matte line"?

That's what I wondered as well. Growing up, I remember the blue being closer to the top than to the bottom picture. I don't know the definitive color timing of that element, though.

The bottom shot, IIRC, is based on Adywan's corrected version. I think he, like many of us, were somewhat corrupted by years of watching Empire. The glow in the upper pic could be a little more saturated, probably a hair less green, but it seems to have originally tended more towards bluish cyan than true blue.

It's always been difficult to determine that perfect hue that's not *too* blue, but at the same time not too greenish either.

Also keep in mind, it would not have looked exactly the same from shot to shot - even though it was more consistent originally than it is now, every shot wouldn't have completely matched when put side by side. (For example, long before the SE, I think I noticed Vader's saber tending towards red-orange in a couple shots, rather than pure red.)

Stinky-Dinkins said:

ww12345 said:

That's what I wondered as well. Growing up, I remember the blue being closer to the top than to the bottom picture. I don't know the definitive color timing of that element, though.

 The top is more green than blue though, and it definitely wasn't green.

As I said, he used the 2011 Blu-ray glow, which is basically the 2004 without the green tint / a more saturated version of the 1997 glow. In Harmy's behind-the-scenes video for that shot, the clip from the actual Blu-ray has a more vivid color, while in his final composite the glow is less saturated.

This is from the actual 2011 SE Blu-ray:

Here's Cobra Kai's screengrab from the WP:

For all the things they did wrong in 2011, the hue of the glow seems correct.

I don't think the horizon line in the "Binary Sunset" sequence should be crisp, if that's what people were getting at. I think it should have some level of atmospheric distortion...

ww12345 said:

I don't think the horizon line in the "Binary Sunset" sequence should be crisp, if that's what people were getting at. I think it should have some level of atmospheric distortion...

The horizon line should be diffused, yes, but notice that the edge of the hut is too. That seems to be an after-effect of Harmy's isolation of the sky so that he could adjust it separately from everything else - it looks like he slightly blurred the dividing line between the two or something?

Harmy said:

I most certainly did not use the Blu-Ray glow in that shot. And the second one is definitely not from Ady's version, you should compare those lightsabre shots with v1.0 and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Oh, sorry, my bad. I have no idea why I thought that. I guess I misremembered.

Harmy said:

Also, I did make the horizon line sharp at first but it looked wrong.

The horizon line looks good - it's supposed to be blurry and diffused, and has always looked pretty much like that. But is there any way you could make the edges of the hut against the sky sharper, while keeping the horizon line soft? The hut is in the foreground, hence the edges should be much harder and clearer than the far-off horizon line.

Yes, I just watched it again. Notice I kept talking about the glow, not the core. I know he restored the core from the original, but doesn't the blue glow still come from the Blu-ray? That's the impression I've always gotten from that video.

Stinky-Dinkins said:

In those lightsaber shots the upper shot leans more towards green, especially relative to the lower cap.

I'd wager that the correct color is in between those two. Something like this:

As I said before, I think we've been corrupted by Empire, where it was a more pure shade of blue. All signs point to there being a bit more cyan; not as greenish as the frame on the left, but not *as* blue as the frame on the right.