3 ms·

Is the "wrong gamma" problem that (pixel intensity)^gamma is proportional to luminance, but the software incorrectly does its antialising calculations directly

• iainmerrick 9y ago
  Yes, that's basically it. I think there are at least two different mistakes that can be made. When a font is rendered you usually calculate the per-pixel coverage. Mistake one is to interpret those coverage values as if they're sRGB colors (so 50% coverage would be #808080 which is a rather dark gray in sRGB, not mid-gray). That makes text look heavier than it should be, and makes diagonal lines look jaggy. Mistake two is to blend sRGB colors directly rather than converting them to a linear space first. That can give colored fringes on blended images, because the RGB intensities get skewed.
• kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  They were replicating the look of small fonts on CRTs where black text on a light background needed thicker lines to compensate for the bleed from neighboring active phosphors "shrinking" the apparent weight.