I realise that the results here look slightly ugly. One reason is because of the video transfer, tones don't saturate evenly or smoothly, so you have that blotchy effect, especially in faces, the video literally cannot handle colours like this and begins to break up a bit. Perhaps the settings were a bit too saturated, but if they are it is only by a bit; a lot of people have their monitor settings too vibrant keep in mind as well. Some shots needed to be treated individually (Han in the SW cockpit comes to mind, too orange) but I wanted to leave them on a "one-light" printing for demo purposes.
But in fact, this kind of vibrancy is basically what the films looked like. The colours were bright and saturated and skin tones were vibrant. The effect is not fully reproduced here because of the video issues and also because I didn't spend enough time getting a totally pleasing effect but just did a quick pass for a demonstration.
What people always ask though is what was the palette of the films? What was the "look"? Is it like the SE, or the GOUT? It is actually in between, but leaning towards the SE, and in fact the actual original colours are often more vibrant that the 2004 transfer because of frequent dullness that transfer was plagued with in shots. No one has ever seen the film look right since theatres.
One way you can tell that the vibrancy here is approximately accurate is because you get colour in Hoth and in the Death Star again, and you get those luminant skin tones. That is what the Technicolor print looks like, and it's sort of the way the SE looks like as well, and also other prints and stills --and it's all there on the GOUT. Which indicates that this approximate level of saturation is appropriate. Again, there are some issues, the video doesn't reproduce it well and maybe I could have made the tones more pleasing looking or backed off a touch. You can't get the original colours to look accurate like this and also pleasant, which is why G-Force and LFL Pwnage just gave it a bit of a bump rather than something radical like this. Even then, I felt LFL Pwnage had some popping issues; I've stated before that my favourite version thusfar is the newer Editdroid, even though its the most desaturated and thus the least accurate, but it just looks more pleasant to me.
However, I think it is noteworthy to demonstrate how desaturated the GOUT is, that colours that approximate the Technicolour levels is actually hidden in there and that it reveals a lot of information about the grading palettes--Dagobah being so green and blue, rather than grey and brown, with colour back in the Death Star as already confirmed by other sources, and blue tinting returning back to Hoth in most (but not all, mind you) scenes there. You also get to see that a lot of scenes, even in live action, had unexpected colour casts either in lighting or grading or just print fluxuations, which has been seen in other prints and stills but never in home video telecines. I just thought this would be interesting for demonstration purposes, that the GOUT has fairly accurate colour buried in it if you can extract it. Again, the effect is not the greatest looking for various reasons, but like I said the original colour vibrancy is pretty close to the levels here and it changes the GOUT palette pretty radically, which a lot of people might not have seen before.