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Not knowing about linear space means that people were using linear by default, right? That’s what I would assume. Early games and all the graphics I was exposed
by dahart 2y ago
Not knowing about linear space means that people were using linear by default, right? That’s what I would assume. Early games and all the graphics I was exposed to up through college all used linear RGB, but just didn’t call it that, and of course RGB isn’t a real color space anyway. Most people didn’t know about gamma correction, and otherwise almost nobody converted into non-linear spaces or tried to differentiate RGB from something else. Color geeks at Pixar and Cornell and other places were working with non-linear colors, but I guess most people writing code to display pixels in the 70s & 80s weren’t thinking color spaces at all, they just plugged in some RGB values.
- Etherlord87 2y agoAccording to wikipedia, sRGB is a standard created in 1996, so yeah, it just wasn't used earlier. However at the end of the millenium you could create software that opens an image file saved in sRGB, and unknowingly apply some algorithm, like dithering, without converting it to linear space first.
- dahart 2y agoThere was gamma correction and other perceptually uniform-ish color spaces before 1996 and before sRGB. I was taught about the CIE set of color spaces xyY/XYZ/LAB/LUV in school and used them to write renderers before I’d ever heard of sRGB. And yes exactly right, before they know better, a lot of people will grab something non-linear and starting doing linear math on it accidentally. It’s still one of the most common color mistakes to this day, I think, but it was definitely more common before sRGB. People sometimes forget basic alpha-blend compositing needs linearized colors, so it’s a common cause of fringe artifacts. Things have gotten much better though, and quickly. A lot of game studios 20 years ago didn’t have much in the way of color management, and it’s ubiquitous now.