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You’re conflating the tools with user errors. Photoshop, Resolve, and Blender aren’t doing it wrong because some users do it wrong. Gamma correction workflows a
by dahart 3y ago
You’re conflating the tools with user errors. Photoshop, Resolve, and Blender aren’t doing it wrong because some users do it wrong. Gamma correction workflows are just prone to error, and sometimes people don’t know how to do it right. It’s not in general possible for the tool do handle it for you, the user needs to know the image’s history and sometimes has to convert between gamma encodings explicitly.
I don’t even know what you mean about Outlook and Teams, are you saying the text gamma is wrong? Or they display images wrong?
> Developers assuming that RGB is a triplet of 8-bit numbers and that maths can be naively done to those numbers is one of my favourite examples of the Dunning Kruger effect. [1]
RGB is a triplet of numbers, and you can do naive math on them, to convert to another color space for example. RGB in fact is a naive color space in the first place, not well defined, and does not have a defined gamma, so all math on RGB is de facto naive. sRGB is not RGB.
BTW, please don’t invoke Dunning Kruger snidely to suggest someone’s wrong. It’s a bad meme because DK is widely misunderstood, and suggesting someone’s an example because they’re wrong, ironically, perpetuates the misunderstanding. People making assumptions, or doing something wrong, or even being incompetent, are not examples of Dunning Kruger. People being over-confident is also not an example of Dunning Kruger: they showed in the paper that there is a positive correlation between confidence and competence for the tasks they measure. Therefore, you cannot know when something is an example of DK or not. The paper has rather poor methodology, it is full of priming and leading questions, including the title, and it went viral not because it’s right but because people love to believe the mistaken idea that someone who’s very confident might be incompetent, even though that’s not what the paper demonstrated. Also the Dunning Kruger effect probably doesn’t even exist, plus replication attempts have shown the opposite effects for more difficult tasks, like, say, engineering.
https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-krug...
- marcedwards 3y ago>You’re conflating the tools with user errors. Photoshop, Resolve, and Blender aren’t doing it wrong because some users do it wrong. I agree, but defaults also matter. I’d like our tools to not assume everyone’s an expert, which means the default should be to provide good results. Photoshop can definitely work with linear profiles, and the 32-bit mode is good when you need it.
- dahart 3y agoYeah, totally agree, defaults absolutely matter. And a bunch of the software @jiggawatts claimed handles gamma badly does in fact have reasonable defaults. The hard problem with images is that you need metadata, not just pixel values, and the metadata isn’t guaranteed to be there or to be accurate. It’s getting better quickly, I think, but it’s not Photoshop’s fault if the image doesn’t specify a color space or gamma, and not Photoshop’s fault if someone applies gamma first and then does a blur or paints a mask and then the blending isn’t what they expected.
- marcedwards 3y agoYep, yep, yep. Getting better quickly, but regressions are common, too. (QuickLook on macOS hasn’t shown correct colours for a while now. FB12602125 and FB13475690 if anyone from Apple is reading this and wants to take a look!)