> Besides, part of the problem is that POV-Ray is incapable of handling
> scenes with high levels of contrast which are meaningful to the human
> eye. If it can't generate this much contrast - even algorithmically,
> before it ever puts pixel to screen - then how can it possibly extract
> an accurate simulation from the crippled data?

I think it can, but it needs to take place before the pixel is written to the
file.  POV seems to store the RGB colors as floating point numbers, which should
provide more than enough dynamic range.  Only problem I see is that numbers
greater than one get clipped, which means that you would still need to make an
effort not to have colors in the scene that exceed this.  This isn't all that
hard though...

Looking at the source, I notice that COLOUR is defined as an array of floats, so
that should be 32-bits per color (I think).    So if you knew the point just
before the program changes the color to whatever the bit depth the image is, you
could run it through the exposure or compression filter.  Better yet, store the
image in floating point format for later post-processing filters, but I imagine
that would require quite a chunk of memory or disk space.

-Mike

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