Calibrating to sRGB - Page 3

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tyrone Burton 

Hi people.

I've always thought that sRGB was 2.2, from what I've heard. But by trying to understand this thread, you guys seem to be leaning towards 2.3? I'm calibrating to sRGB for games mainly so if I'm wrong in assuming it's 2.2, is there a right one to be choosing?

I believe the authors of sRGB were trying to approximate 2.2. However, the effective exponent of the sRGB reverse transformation varies from 1.0 at black to 2.275 at white. It's about 2.224 at "middle gray" though, as shown on my table below.

There are alot of different ways of computing an "average" exponent on a function like this. One of those methods might well yield a value in the 1.95 range. But based on the table above and graph below, I think a 1.95 gamma would be a poor approximation to the sRGB reverse transformation.

Quote:

Originally Posted by sotti

And for reference here is what sRGB looks like in point:

It would not have been that difficult to design the sRGB reverse transfomation to hit exactly 2.20 at 50% stimulus rather 2.224 btw. IMO though the real target of the sRGB transformation was probably 0.45 (or 1/2.2222...) on the encoding side, as shown on the graph below.

(click to enlarge for a better view)

Prior to the implementation of sRGB, most PC graphics applications (excluding Macs and SGI) typically used either 0.45 or 1/2.2 (0.454545...) for gamma correction. I guess the designers of sRGB probably felt that 0.45 was the simpler and perhaps more commonly used value, and used that as their guide.

The 0.45 and 1/2.2 values were most likely adopted by the PC graphics industry from the older NTSC camera gamma standard btw.