Just some musings, little head or tail,

For some time now I of and on work as a volunteer in a local museum. The big job
to be dome is digitizing the collection, mostly by means of photography. The
whole process has to be reviewed every now and then.

In the workflow we convert RAW images to DNG files. Every operation on the image
is stored as a kind of 'script' in the file and no pixel is changed. From the
script(s) a new image(s) can be rendered. Parametric Image Editing [1]. In a way
POV-Ray is a Parametric Image Editor/Creator, an image is rendered on a set of
rules.

I.i.r.c. POV-Ray' internal resolution(?) and or colour depth is different than
what is written to file. So the ray-tracing part is one set of parameters. The
conversion to the actual image is an other set of, mostly fixed, parameters.

Imagine that we can use something else for the second part. Lets say
ImageMagick. POV-Ray's "internal image" then would be comparable with a raw file
from a camera.

Now we can use ImageMagick to do the conversion to screen ready image. But with
the power of it a lot more can be done. All the processing it can do can be
applied to the RAW part for rendering. You could write a parametric processing
script in your POV-Ray file that is applied after rendering, or you can store it
in the 'RAW image'. You can write multiple processing scripts for different
outputs. You can use the post processing for manipulation of many aspects of the
image.

Can it be pushed even further? During rendering POV-Ray has to know with what
object a ray intersects. Can these data somehow be saved? Primary intersection,
secondary intersection? "RedSphere" is a list of pixels. BlueSphere an other
one. Now we can select pixels by object (-intersection) instead of by colour as
in the Gimp. These pixels can be fed into the post-processor, so we can apply
effects to the red sphere and not to the red box. Can such data be stored in a
DNG file? Or can we finally use SQLite ;) (SQLite as a project container format
could be nice)  Or, even store the whole POV-Ray scene in a DNG as metadata.

An other thought, could it be possible to attach such scripts directly to an
object and modify the object/texture with them while rendering?

[1] https://dpbestflow.org/image-editing/parametric-image-editing

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