The explanation for the blu-ray being orange/teal is because that was a trendy color scheme for action movies at the time. It tends to make things “pop”. It was an attempt to make the film look more modern and to better match Crystal Skull.
So that’s why. I’ve heard about this before. According to TV Tropes:
"Basic complementary color theory states that when two contrasting colors are put together, they “pop,” so the natural technique is to color films to have a strong, contrasting palette.
The one thing you will almost always have in a film is people. Human skin runs from pale pinkish yellow to dark brown, all of which are shades of orange. The color that contrasts best with orange is blue. So you turn up the shadows to the cyan end and the highlights to the orange.
Unlike other pairs of complementary colors, fiery orange and cool blue are strongly associated with opposing concepts — fire and ice, earth and sky, land and sea, day and night, invested humanism vs. elegant indifference, good old fashioned explosions vs. futuristic science stuff."
It’s not as big as it was back then, since it was trend like you stated, but I doubt Spielberg and even Lucas (shocking, I know) had this in mind when shooting Raiders back in the day. But if they approved the transfer, then I guess there’s nothing to do other than wish DrDre the best of luck.
It is shocking to me that Spielberg approved it. Not only because of the color changes, but because it is sloppily done. Color is inconsistent from shot to shot, contrast is reduced, gamma is all over the place, it’s over brightened, color is way oversaturated and there is heavy use of DNR. Some scenes look nice, but overall it is really a mess. Especially when you know how it is supposed to look. I find it hard to believe he is really happy with it. But most likely he never watches it. He has a state of the art cinema in his house, and probably only ever watches high quality prints of his own films.
In this link here it states Spielberg worked from an original negative correcting the print and that Raiders is exactly as it was when released in 1981.
http://collider.com/raiders-of-the-lost-ark-steven-spielberg/
My theory is this is the transfer Spielberg approved for the Blu-ray release because whatever he worked on certainly doesn’t appear to be what the final result turned out to be. Maybe he kept the print for himself?
That article is about the 30th Anniversary restoration, which is the version we call the Wowow. The restoration was done by Laser Pacific from the camera negative, probably in 2010. It was shown in several cinemas around the US in the fall of 2011. I saw it twice in Los Angeles and it looked great.
That restoration was supposed to be the blu-ray release and in fact the early blu-ray trailers used shots from that version. The orange/teal re-grade was hastily done by Technicolor the following year prior to the IMAX and blu-ray releases in summer/fall of 2012. When I saw the IMAX screening I almost fell out of my chair because it looked so different (and much worse) than the version I had seen the previous year.
So it is somewhat ironic that Spielberg did a lot of publicity for that version and then allowed huge changes to it before it got released on blu-ray.