RGB 16 bit as default when starting Krita

[Kai-Uwe Behrmann]

> Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:16:56 +0300
> From: Dmitry Kazakov <dimula73 at gmail.com>
> 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

Most professionals and many interessted hobbyists in the west shoot raw 
since some time now. That can be seen how much RAW workflows are prefered. 
Keeping fidelity as long as possible is a main goal for people. Cost for 
storage is dropping for many people shooting in RAW. So what is the 
advantage of a conversion to 8-bit for those?

> "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

Conversion to 8-bit makes sense for low bandwidth media like internet and 
possibly office documents.
But for source material rules: Once quality is lost its lost.
Of course that does not necessarily hold true for familiy albums.

> 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.

Look at the according email lists. Some special applications started to 
use those kind of monitors often for printing. Now while they are becoming 
affortable many smaller studios can buy them too. In the near 
future they will mix in the basic computer stores and be virtually 
everywhere.

> 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.

The real world has more colours to provide that sRGB. That people look at 
the world through their often enough far from sRGB monitors is not a 
problem of the worlds colours.

> PS:
> I'm not even speak about the problems our users face, when they decide to
> print their masterpiece in the lab..

Krita can save to 8-bit sRGB and embedd ICC profiles for most formats. 
Thats kind of choices IMO are all fine.


kind regards
Kai-Uwe Behrmann
-- 
developing for colour management 
www.behrmann.name + www.oyranos.org