Recently @agriggio commented on the unbounded option saying “So if you really want to make this work, you should probably not deviate much from neutral (i.e. demosaicing, exposure compensation, denoising and lens corrections should be fine, everything else should be better left alone)”
Surely it would be nice if some more of the tools were cleared for unbounded processing? E.g. tone curves. What do you think? I’ve opened a github suggestion, #5112.
When I think about it, unbounded means that pixel values can be ‘anything’. But for example a tone curve is bounded by its nature: bottom left means dark, that is fine.
But what does top right mean? At the moment that is the ‘upper bound’ - plain white, 0xffffff.
If that were to be ‘nuclear blast white’, the histogram for a normal photo would appear all the way to the left. And even that is not ‘unbounded’.
It might be better to have a normalization step (auto exposure) and have teh rest of the pipeline work with precise but scaled data.
Or am I mistaken?