A lot has been made of the problem of black crushing with these transfers but the highlight clipping is a much worse problem because it creates massive colour shifts. Red and blue highlights both clipped will give a full saturation of magenta at 100% brightness. Red and blue clipped shadows will still be black. Also highlight clipping creates hard-clipped specular highlights which are usually associated with video which has a narrow dynamic range, whereas deep shadows with nicely rolled-off highlights give the impression of watching film. Restoring the highlight detail allows the use of steep curves to stretch the black levels while retaining highlight detail. When you restore the highlight detail the specular highlights lose their hard edge and create a softer filmic look. Another problem with fully-saturated colours is that background objects are so fluorescent that they make a perceptual shift to the foreground. This is why these transfers suck so much, it's not the colours, it's that they just don't resemble film.
An example of how much red channel detail is missing from Star Wars is shown below. When you watch this uncorrected frame normally it looks horrid. The yellow and blue flames are swallowed up by red to give a pink fireball with a very hard edge where the clipping starts. These are raw Blu-ray captures. In the bottom one I've recovered the highlights in the red channel. Sorry Harmy, not trying to hijack your thread. I'll probably start one showing more instances of these problems.
