2006.12.06 02:05 "Re: [Tiff] Grayscale, or is it?", by Graeme Gill

It is true that the notion of "linear" is not well defined. A video engineers notion of "linear" differs from the 3D renderer's notion of "linear". To the broadcast engineer, gamma corrected video can be considered "linear" since each quantization step is proportionally brighter to the human viewer. But for purposes of rendering and sensing, "linear" means "linear light".

Maybe, or are Video engineers really talking about a linear response transmission channel, which they can feed their non-linearly encoded signal over? (Of course, most may not really know). But video conventions aren't the dominant ones in the computer world, and a lot of the video conventions (The word "Luminance" for instance) are out of kilter with the international standards applying to color science and imaging.

Graeme Gill.