I think the main problem with the 80s transfers is not inaccurate color so much as completely inaccurate levels. The brightness, contrast, gamma, etc. were adjusted during the transfer process so that it would look good on the TVs of the time. Everything has a flat, low-contrast, and often overly bright look (especially in darker scenes like the binary sunset or R2 in the canyon, where the brightness/gamma was obviously turned up).
I don't think these old transfers were timed differently from scene to scene - cinch believes that only general tweaking was done to get the image to match it to the specs of analog video and the TVs of the time. The main adjustments seemed to be to flatten the contrast and boost the gamma.
When a print was transferred to video via film chain (the way movies were run on TV before telecine), the image was always blown out, because film prints have a higher contrast and dynamic range that the analog video of the time could not reproduce. Dark areas would come out as black, light areas would come out as bright washes, and detail would be lost. The ITV airing of the film seems to have that kind of blown-out look; my theory is that they received a print and transferred it themselves, standard operating procedure for film on over-the-air TV at the time.
With that in mind, here's what I was able to get out of the original version of that Luke screenshot just by playing with the brightness/contrast settings in Microsoft Office Picture Manager. I turned the shadows down, turned the highlights up, brought up the midtones a bit, and turned up the contrast. As for the color saturation, I found that I got a better result by turning it *down*, not up. After I did my level adjustments, the colors looked too strong, and as Mike Verta says, the film had muted colors. This is the end result:
Here is a before-and-after comparison of the two (at half-size, to obscure the video noise, compression, and the additional artifacting caused by my adjustments):
I don't think this is exactly how the colors looked on film, and I couldn't bring the contrast up any more without making it look horrible, but it feels a lot closer. It has the warm temperature and fairly muted color that Mike talks about.
These are the tests I did in the other thread:
The original images were screenshots of a PAL video, and my adjustments involved no actual color correction, only brightness/contrast/gamma/saturation. As you can see, they also feel closer to what we know about the original colors.
Adjusting the old 80s transfers will not definitively determine the accurate colors, but if the film source had timing close to the original theatrical version, adjusting the levels to approximate the higher contrast of film might help point us in the right direction. In short, we can't get accurate color out of these sources, but we may be able to find "clues" to the color balance of the scene.
Besides these releases being in pan-and-scan, the adjustments I'm doing cause crushing, blowout and other detail loss, as well as amplifying existing artifacts, so my corrections would look awful in motion. I'm only trying to figure out the balance of the colors; I don't think that watchable color-corrections of these releases are possible. I'm doing this to help -1 with his 35mm project, since the print is not faded, but the transfer still has to be color-corrected.
In the Colortiming and Cinematography thread, I explained that even if the color timing on the film was close to the '77 theatrical color, analog NTSC video was incapable of accurately reproducing it, hence the old joke among supporters of PAL that it stands for "Never Twice the Same Colour." I believe that captures of 80s PAL laserdiscs would be more helpful than the NTSC ones we have. Anybody on this forum have any?