yotsuya said:
Well, I'm assuming they are all off. I'm not trying to match the original theatrical colors. I'm trying to match the other Star Wars films. ANH is really messed up. Lowry's choices for how they balanced the colors (and possibly even the hardware they used to scan the film) produced magenta heavy coloring. Yes, the original has magenta toned flashes, but they aren't pure digital magenta, they have yellow undertones. The storm troopers seen through the flash should look yellowish and instead Lowry gave us magenta stormtroopers under the magenta flashes. Also, the burn through of the blockade runner should be brilliant white, not magenta. Remember, regardless of how close or off the pre DVD home video releases are, they are all done from original prints, color timed to the release. I believe the definative edition was from an interpositive, meaning first generation off the negative and used to make the internegatives the theatrical prints were struck from. I'm weighing my color choices based on that. I also don't trust technicolor prints for color saturation.
My goal is for C-3P0 to be the same golden color in episodes III, IV, V, VI, and beyond. Right now the best example of a gold that matches episodes III, V, and VI is the TR47 capture of the definitive edition. Also for R2-D2 to be the same brilliant blue in all 6 movies. That might be hard with how wacked the colors are in Ep I, but the rest should be doable.
And it is funny you posted that pic of the rebel trooper. I was just finishing my first draft of color correcting the ANH bluray today and what I ended up with looks a lot like the tech IB image. What I found works (in Sony Vegas) is something that I was leary to use, but none of my other tests came close. Channel Blend gave me the answer to change the colors in one step. It gave me a higher contrast image, brighter colors, muted the reds and magentas, gave nice peachy skin tones, and looks like the colors from TESB. I still need to manually color correct one scene (which requires retouching the color on every from from one camera angle of C-3PO on the sand) and I will be done. For me to even attempt to watch it I will also have to remove that damned rock, but that will be my viewing copy.
I'll post pictures if these color settings pass my viewing test.
Actually, the fact that George Lucas apparently wanted R2D2 to be the same brilliant blue in all six both, introduced a ton of trouble. In Star Wars R2D2's paint job was such, that the blue panels could seem almost black under certain light conditions. For The Empire Strikes Back the panels were given a different blue color, which would remain pretty much the same for the other five movies. Trying to color match R2D2's paint job in Star Wars to the others, introduced all kinds of blue artifacts, to the degree that Luke's shirt has blue streaks, and the homestead of Owen and Beru has blue in it's white paint job. It looks completely awful.
Here's how R2D2 looked in the first two original films:
Star Wars:
The Empire Strikes Back:
Trying to match these colors is going to be pretty much impossible, without introducing problems in other areas. This is why the best you can hope to achieve is to approach what was on the original negative, but in that case R2D2 is going to look somewhat different in Star Wars than in the others.