Well, that last draft did not turn out so well. Some of the scenes looked fantastic, but some were horrible. I did something to the blacks. I was using curves to help correct the color and that has its drawbacks. I think I am going to have to rethink my approach to this. In the mean time, I need some good reference material. Considering my goal, that is going to be scenes from eps 2, 3, 5, & 6. These have the least color issues. I put on the original (uncorrected or upscaled) GOUT TESB and was amazed at the colors. It hardly needs to be touched. There are relatively consistent orange jumpsuits, yellow helmet goggles, nice skin tones, bright scenes, dark scenes, a pretty consistent (especially after watching ANH like 40 times) R2-D2 and C-3PO. So I am going to focus on TESB and ROTJ first, then turn to ATOC and ROTS. The latter, coincidentally, have recreated sets found in ANH. It means I have to convert some PAL sources to 24 fps (well, almost 24, close enough when talking about it). Those 4 should give me plenty of example scenes to color match to.

I also need to figure out what Lowry did. I figured out how the negative faded. The green info faded about 50 percent and the blue about 25. Not enough to prevent that original negative from being used to crate nice IP's for the 97 SE. Rick McCallum and George Lucas have repeatedly told us that the original negative was recut and that the 97 SE used photographic restoration techniques. But then add another decade and what did Lowry have to scan? How did they scan it? How did they correct the colors. I am tempted to reverse engineer what they did to arrive at that horribly faded green image of Vader on the blockade runner. I can recreate it in photoshop using a color corrected screen cap, but not all those tools are available for video editing. I think I need to know how Lowry tried to fix the image to know how to actually fix it. And then there are Lucasfilm's changes. Plenty to keep me busy experimenting while I work on the other 4 movies. I think after ANH, I can tackle TPM, which suffers from similar, though less severe, color issues (that have nothing to do with fading and everything to do with editing choices).