This confirms one other thing: the Death Star interiors are not neutral grey. They are frequently green and blue tinted. I had suspected this from other sources but this just further confirms it.
People tend to think they should be a neutral colour because of the GOUT. But the GOUT/DC is not a good colour reference in this respect. The print is so washed out and pink shifted from fading that any colour that was originally there would not be detectable.
Now, the Technicolor print might have a tinge to it, and the photographing camera white balance may shift things more. But they could not possibly be responsible for the entirety of the green and blue tint. The rest of the image just looks so...right. The skin tones in particular are a dead giveaway--they look vivid and natural.
Here are some examples from the I.B. print.
Don't those look fantastic? So vivid! These shots are some of the more extreme examples--the green and blue tints vary in intensity from shot to shot. There's little consistency. And this should be considered a valid element of the original cinematography. Again, the print and the camera white balance might exaggerate things a little, but they could not possibly explain all of it.
Further proof? The 70mm cells collection from the 1990s. The Death Star is incredibly green in those. I thought maybe it was a bad print, but not any more. Also, in their 1979 book The Movie Brats, I always remember that the authors refer to the Death Star as a "grey-green" world. Not grey. Grey-green. Coincidence? Doubtful.
To confirm this, I re-timed the GOUT to natural levels. Here is the same shot of Han from the GOUT. The DC is even more pink and washed out than this.
Pretty gross looking. The 1985 IP is fading, so the image is washed out and pink shifted. First, I boosted the saturation by 40 points to get it to a level of vividness that matched the Technicolor print. The walls of the Death Star began to look pink; the tinting is otherwise hidden because the colours were so washed out. Then I dialed out the pink until skin tones looked natural, like on the Technicolor print. Dialing out a pink shift means adding green and some yellow (complementary colours) to neutralize the shift. The result looks something like this:
This is not exact; by Han's skin you can see it needs more green to get rid of some red hues, and a bit of yellow might make it better too, and the walls maybe need more blue and less green. The image lacks the deep contrast of the Technicolor print, which would bring out the colours further. But you can see--the Death Star walls here have a green hue that is very similar to the Technicolor screencap.
Now, as I mentioned, not every shot is like this. In fact, a couple shots are pretty neutral. But most of them aren't. So the green and blue hues of the Death Star interior are the original cinematography.
