"Sven Geier" <.sven.at.sgeier.dot.net.nospamplease> wrote:
> All that said - my preferred way of looking at POV-Ray is from an arts
> perspective...And from an arts perspective, the recent betas of 3.7 have produced
results that
> looked like foot. But looked a lot better if I take them individually into a
> paint program after the fact - and reduce gamma by about ~50%.
>
> Am I the only one who looks at things this way? Who is the target audience here,
> really? And what do they want and think? I am honestly curious.

Wow, ouch, "foot" doesn't sound so good (although I'm not sure what that means
where you live), but I definitely look at POV from an artist's perspective too.
And even though I'm a programming geek I try to put aside most of the technical
trivia and just get shots to look the way I want, using whatever means I need to
achieve that look.

Anyway, as for me, this 3.7 gamma change has really hampered me this last
several weeks since I (finally) started using the beta, because I just didn't
understand what it was all about, my old POV mindset was so ingrained I thought
something had gone whacky (which from that point of view, it did).

Now I've realized that I need to learn more about how colors and intensities of
those colors are propagated to various hardware devices, and that gamma
correction is the tool to make sure we all see the same thing, regardless of
what system we're using (assuming default gamma settings are correct on various
computers, which it seems they're not, and that bugs me).

I'd honestly prefer to work in linear 1.0 floating point gamma space and have my
output be a non-dithered, non-clamped HDR/EXR so there's no information lost,
but to be able to see that image as a properly gamma corrected preview on my
render window that looks like what my non-linear human eye would expect it to.

Or maybe I should just take up oil painting again... it's so analog.

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