The title is slightly exaggerating as pretty much all top grade image editing software uses linear space, internally, and hence gets this right. Examples are Di

The title is slightly exaggerating as pretty much all top grade image editing software uses linear space, internally, and hence gets this right. Examples are DigitalFusion, The Foundry's Nuke and Apple's discontinued Shake. When working in a space that has any profile burned in, all non-floating point data must also be promoted to a wider bit depth than the input or else the linearization will introduce banding. As memory (RAM) used to be scarce when people started writing such programs, the fact this problem exists still nowadays imho is twofold: (1) lack of understanding of the problem per se and (2) [hardware & processing] constraints of the systems such software ran on, 15 years ago. Neither is an excuse of course.