The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition Color Restoration

Hello to all fans of the Peter Jackson’s trilogy!

Unfortunately, all official Blu-ray releases of The Fellowship of the Ring suffer from many problems: in the Extended Edition ugly green tint throughout the entire course of the film, in the Theatrical Edition the overuse of both digital noise reduction (DNR) and artificial sharpening.

To restore the colors of the Extended Edition I had to create more than 4000 LUTs! I used the Dr. Dre’s Color Matching Tool, Adobe Premiere Pro CC with the plugin Voukoder, MeGUI and AutoOverlay AviSynth plugin.

Some scenes from 44rh1n’s release (he doesn’t mind):
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/44rh1ns-The-Fellowship-of-the-Ring-Extended-Edition-Color-Restoration/id/61952

44rh1n said:

Dwalin used my grades of the extended scenes, but went even further by completing a shot-for-shot regrade of the rest of the theatrical footage from the extended Blu-ray as well (unlike my release, which uses the theatrical Blu-ray for those scenes).

I haven’t watched it yet, and I haven’t done a side by side comparison with the DVD yet either. So I can’t yet verify the integrity and consistency across all of its shots. But a quick scrub through of the film looked pretty good to me! (There are a few shots that I noticed have some banding and other compression artifacts though.).

I think it’s really cool that there are multiple restorations out there now! Hopefully Warner/New Line will see our demand for a proper release!

I also removed the green tint in the Extended Edition of The Two Towers.

I am currently working on a new version of the FOTR using Remastered Blu-ray as the source in some scenes.