Dunedain said:

I'm not sure if adding grain helps that much, though. Since some of the natural grain and detail have already unfortunately been removed on the blu-ray set, adding artificial grain over it might just obscure some of the nice detail that has been retained.

Yeah, it definitely would obscure some detail actually - it's more about the feeling you get from watching it - the way it is now, it feels very digital; adding some grain definitely won't add any actual detail but it would help it feel more warm and authentic and even feel more detailed and I think that is more important than the actual measurable amount of detail resolved.

In that comparison, I added quite a large amount of quite coarse grain because it was just a quick proof of concept - I think with more care, it could look a lot better with some finer grain.

I have to disagree with Alex too, IMHO the entire transfer has excessive amount of DNR, in some shots it's simply even more excessive than in others. Basically, when dealing with a scan from original negative (which the master here should be) any grain removal at all is excessive IMO.

Also before anyone asks, I'm not considering doing anything with the other 2 prequels, because A) I hate them and B) AFAIK, Episode II is the theatrical version in the HDTV broadcast and there are some very decent ones floating around and Ep III is the theatrical version on BD and the only version of that I ever want to see again is also already out there (the Backstroke of the West dubbing synced to the BD).