Sorry Bill... this is all new information to me. I remember there was some discussion on gamma correction or the VSS Skin Shaders thread, but since I didn't have Poser Pro kinda glossed over it.

I can see now that was a mistake.

Now, I need to study up to understand exactly what the difference is between linear colour vs sRGB. I did read up on Wikipedia on sRGB some time ago (probably remembering about a tenth of it). However, the discussion on Wiki regarding linear colour brings into focus: yes, gamma:

"We’re all computer users whose primary interface for viewing images is the monitor. Everything about monitors, including their aspect ratio, comes from their ancestors: old television sets.

Old television sets were bad - it took a lot of voltage to make them bright. That’s the thing to remember - that images on a monitor are “darker than they should be”, which we’ll need to know later in order to debug what’s going wrong.

Monitors have a gamma of about 2.5, which looks like the graph shown here**
**

Monitor Gamma of about 2.5

**. As you can see, with a voltage of 50%, you’re nowhere close to getting 50% brightness.**But when we watch videos, look at pictures, and work on our computer, the images look the way we think they should, don’t they? For display on television sets, video cameras compensate by producing images that are slightly “brighter”, so the result is a gamma of about 2.2."

There's that magical number you mentioned: 2.2.

But we still haven't defined what "linear colour" actually is. So, I read on, hoping:

"In Windows, the sRGB standard** (http://www.w3.org/Graphics/Color/sRGB) for the web (any operating system) is used to give you the experience of having a monitor with a gamma of 2.2. In other words, the monitor profile applies a very small gamma correction of about 1.1 to brighten things up a bit. Our eyes do not want a linear response, and it is pleasing to have an extra gamma applied to images. Linear images appear washed out and we have difficulty seeing the important details.**

Since the images you usually work with (photographs taken with a digital camera, for example) look the way you expect them to, they have obviously have been encoded with a gamma correction that compensates for the darkening the monitor’s response.

What kind of encoding is used? Well, the digital camera captures data from its CCD in some device-specific format. It then copies the pixel values directly to the graphic card buffer, assuming that the graphic card is connected to a device that will respond to these values with a gamma curve of about 2.5, producing a jpeg image that is meant to be viewed on a computer monitor. In other words the jpeg images we work with are, like most other digital images, designed and encoded to be seen on a monitor. They are not linear.

However, when you render an image using a CG application, or paint something in PhotoShop (without any color management setup) no such color encoding happens. Shaders, compositing algorithms, paint brushes, and so on simply poke numerical values without considering what perceptual effect it will have when the image is displayed on a monitor. It's all pure and perfect math, and it doesn’t account for the "impure" way that digital cameras reproduce images.

These calculations all happen in linear space, which means that if a value needs to be twice as bright, the CG application multiplies the value by two, regardless of the fact that the result will in fact not be twice as bright when displayed on a monitor.

While 3D rendering done with Gouraud shading is, by definition, completely linear, things get muddier when you apply image textures to your 3D objects."

Got this from this Wiki on Gamma, Linear Colour Space and HDR.

Looked up linear images, which got me to a page on how a video signal is thrown on to the phosphor screen, and I kinda started to get the idea that linear images are defined by how they are processed (and in this processing somehow gamma is affected) in order for it to be displayed on a television monitor (that interlacing thing).
Which differs only slightly from how a PC monitor displays images.

So if what we are producing in Poser -x (where x=7Pro) are linear images (no gamma), they are going to look like crap on any device that isn't Poser.

Going to go read YOUR dissertations on the subject: hadn't appreciated either their significance or importance. But then, I'm but a neophyte surfer in this ocean of light waves, and I'm being pushed in as they're breaking 20!

 

Monterey/Mint21.x/Win10 - Blender3.x - PP11.3(cm) - Musescore3.6.2

Wir sind gewohnt, daß die Menschen verhöhnen was sie nicht verstehen
[it is clear that humans have contempt for that which they do not understand] 

Metaphor of Chooks