Please ditch the G-word

[anon41087856]

Hi, here is your favorite party-pooper.

I just stumbled upon a new topic here, talking about “linear gamma”, and that reminded me of the Annex A of the CIE 61966-2-1 standard. The one, from 1999, that sets the sRGB color space in stone. It says:

As you may know, the ICC didn’t read the memo: http://www.color.org/sRGB.xalter (ok, that page is from 1996, but they got like 24 years to correct it).

So, could we please collectively take a stand against the G-word, that is absolutely misleading and meaningless, since it has way too many senses (plus another one in stats, which gets very confusing since many image processing papers include both stats distributions and transfer functions, so the “gamma function” can be absolutely anything).

That bloody transfer function that deals with integer quantization at the end of your image-processing pipeline is to be called Opto-Electrical Transfer Function (OETF for the busy people).

Thank you for making the internets a clearer place.

[spid (Sami)]

I think the BBC and NHK may not have gotten the memo either.

[snibgo (Alan Gibson)]

I agree that gamma is an overloaded word, so we rarely know what it means. When it means a power curve, such as v'=a*pow(v,p), I prefer the word “power”.

But I know I’ll never win the battle.

[afre (Alan)]

I only use gamma when referring to fictional characters or events of the science fiction variety. Or the gamma knife, as in the surgical technique or the appearance of the uppercase gamma Γ.

[CarVac]

I was imagining you were bringing up some sort of racial slur used in photography that we’re not to use anymore.

That said, I don’t think it’s an opto-electrical transfer function anymore since we don’t deal with analog electrical values.