[Bf-committers] OpenGL sRGB

[Jason Wilkins]

OpenGL has the ability to automatically convert colors to the sRGB color
space when writing them to the framebuffer and also to read from textures
in a mode that treats the texture as being in sRGB space.

Since I've converted GHOST to use GLEW in order to load WGL extensions I
was thinking it would be easy to go ahead and enable sRGB frame buffers as
an option (sRGB textures could come when I'm writing shaders later).

sRGB can be selectively enabled/disabled as you draw.

It should be off for drawing the UI and other elements whose colors were
selected by the user by looking at how they look on a computer monitor.

It should only be on for elements like lit polygon models in the viewport
so that the lighting computations final result is gamma correct.

But elements in the viewport like the grid floor, wireframes, outlines,
etc. should also not be rendered in sRGB because they are also UI elements.

This leaves images like textures, previews, and render results.

If an image is a jpg or something that has no color correction then can I
assume it is already in sRGB and doesn't need correction?

And if an image does have color correction information I can assume that
Blender has already taken steps to make sure it is in sRGB?

The leaves me thinking that the only place where Blender is not sRGB
correct is when drawing lit 3D models to the viewport.  So it should be
fairly easy to enable that.

It also seems that when reading textures almost all of them will be in
sRGB, so special shader code will be needed to map them to linear inside of
shaders.  However, since it is so rare for shaders to be gamma correct,
this might actually result in strange looking results to people used to
incorrect lighting computations.