El vie, 17-04-2015 a las 19:39 +0200, Krzysztof Kosiński escribió:
8 bits is simply not enough for linear RGB compositing. IIRC, the 256 distinct linear RGB values that can be represented with 8 bits per component are converted to less than 100 distinct color values in sRGB, which results in completely unacceptable image quality and visible banding. At least 16 bits per component are needed for reasonable quality in linear RGB, and 16-bit floats (aka "half floats") are optimal.
It would be a huge benefit for artists if all the compositing and color blending was done in linear RGB, then gamma-correct. Unfortunately, as you just pointed out, 8bpc is inadequate. The first time I saw the property in SVG that Tav mentions, it called my attention. It looked like somebody finally wanted to move away from the legacy 8bpc compositing in sRGB gamma and do the right thing, but I couldn't find more information about it. Is there some consensus about switching to linear compositing for the web? That would be great. And if that's the case. What's the stance of inkscape developers about it? Have you ever discussed about that possibility? Moving to higher bit depth would not only allow linear compositing, but also better gradients (there is at least one long standing bug report about banding in gradients), among other things.
The transition seems complicated, though. If inkscape moves to linear compositing, then browsers and SVG viewers should move to linear compositing as well, otherwise there would be mismatches in the rendering appearance.
Gez