I think all of this illustrates not only how subjective color grading is, but also that there really is an art to it. Some of Dre’s samples look fantastic, while others less so, and sometimes you can really tell that he’s just been working on a shot for far too long - it clearly looked “right” to him when he posted it, but I bet coming back to it a day later it didn’t look nearly so good.
I have found this myself - playing with the color wheels I can look at a shot and think “that looks good”, but small moves toward green or red or blue may also look just as good, as long as the colors are still natural looking. So while I know how to use Resolve to balance the colors and to tweak them this way and that, and to apply LUTs, I also know that I don’t have the same eye for color that other people have. I must confess that often the little tweaks between posted samples of the same frame are completely lost on me, even if one is right above the other.
Consider Raiders of the Lost Ark on Blu-ray. I watched it and thought it looked great. I didn’t notice any color changes. Now that I have seen the OT thread with the side by side images I can see the difference of course, but I wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise. (Same with Back to the Future. But I did notice the tint applied to the Aliens and The Terminator blu-rays without having to be shown!)
Anyway, I think you are on the right track here - I like how you are all collaborating to find a pleasing result for each shot. So far, all the projects graded by individuals (which includes TN1’s Silver Screen Edition, and Harmy’s projects) have had some shots that looked right, others that looked almost right and a few that just looked wrong.
I look forward to seeing Mike Verta’s final reference shots, then we can all just point Dre’s tool at those, generate a LUT and grade our projects the easy way. Hopefully, given Mike’s level of expertise and the degree of research he put into restoring each shot, his final grade will be as close as we’ll ever get to the original colors. Although I bet we’ll all be able to point to at least one shot (and probably not the same one!) and say that it doesn’t look quite right…