This evening I installed the demo for Combustion, based on MBJ's rave reviews. Though I'm very comfortable with Photoshop, I was lost with the Combustion interface. But, with most software packages, I'm like a duck in water if left in the pond long enough.
So, I made a sample rip of the DVD ... specifically the Falcon sequence with the infamous green saber.
I was planning to repaint the thing by hand or whatever it took. Then, while randomly hitting buttons with very little thought, trying to figure out the interface, I found a "Discrete color correction" utility in this program, with a curious set of buttons under the heading "rewire." I started playing with these options and found if you changed these two settings
G <- Y
B <- G
The saber is fixed, and the rest of the shot isn't screwed up. That's right!!! Nothing appears wrong (at least, to my untrained eyes) when I "rewire" the composite data in this fashion. Flesh tones look fine. Color balance looks right. NOW tell me that somebody didn't screw up at Lucasfilm. This is the kind of "crossed wires" mistake that the miswired music in the rear channels reeks of. I am 100% convinced now that this is no "deliberate creative decision" as they're purporting. I did absolutely nothing else to the shot. I just mimicked the composite rewiring in said fashion, and the bad "green saber" shots are now a gorgeous blue, without sacrificing the rest of the shot. I'm sure this will screw up other shots in the film that aren't messed up, but this is very, very, very important information. If we can correct the bad shots, then we can use a utility like the software I mentioned a few posts above to splice in the corrected shots.
This photo is a direct output from Combustion. I did nothing from the source video other than rewire these two colors. The output was a TIFF, which I then converted to a JPEG in photoshop for easier posting to the web. That is all. If the shot is too dark or too saturated or whatever, well, that's what some are saying about the disc as a whole, but this matches the surrounding footage, does it not?
Link removed and put in a post below.