RGB 16 bit as default when starting Krita

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Wed, 20 Jan 2010, Dmitry Kazakov wrote:

> I'm against both. Against as default.
> 
> 1) I don't know how about painting, but in photography 16bit makes
> absolutely nothing. Well, yes, you can invent a couple of testcases with
> "just-converted-from-raw" files, but the result will be extremely subtle. It
> surely does not worth doubled memory/cpu consumption.
> There are HDR's but:
>   a) they are not default choice for Krita
>   b) after temporary merge in 16bit done, nevertheless they should be
> converted to 8bit

But when you work with photos's you load an existing image, right? You don't start 
with a blank image -- this proposal won't convert an 8 bit/channel photo to 16bit/channel
on loading.

> 2) What are you speaking about, guys!? That is a completely theoretical
> colorspace! It has nothing common with real life! There is hardly present a
> monitor covering AdobeRGB, not speaking about this stuff.

Maxy found when experimenting with mypaint that using 16 bit/channel rgb images
gave noticeably smoothing strokes when painting (http://mypaint.intilinux.com/?p=19),
so it could be worth experimenting with.

> Yes, this is really funny to scale a dalai lama picture, but it'll create
> an enormous amount of problems to our users working with real-world images.
> 
> PS:
> I'm not even speak about the problems our users face, when they decide to
> print their masterpiece in the lab..

I'm not sure that there will be problems, given that if you start with a photo,
you will keep the colorspace and bit depth your photo was in, unless you manually
convert. (That said, Maxy also noted that linear rgb gave unintuitive results for
painting. On the other hand, Gegl uses linear light float/channel rgb as the internal 
format.)

Boudewijn