Color Management is the professional answer to handle the effects of non-linear behaviour of (outputting) devices in a production environment. How can we make different outputting devices make the same result, like printing logo's on paper, plastic, textile and painting metal, or like viewing the same image on different (kind of) displays.

For each device, the operating system works together with the hardware to compensate for the non-linearities. This brings the forementioned gamma-curve back again, but we also have to define which shade is exactly meant by Full Red, or (255,0,0) or whatever. All this is captured in the color profile. sRGB is one of them, and this one deals with colors that can be reproduced by about all displays, printers and  so on. You can have a far better one for your monitor, but at the risk of not being able to reproduce some colors on your printer. Nowadays, sRGB is the standard for webpage colors, and the default for PC equipment. It's meant for home and office use, not for high-end graphics.

Implementing CM effectively implies that you do not have to adjust the image itself for the non-linear behaviour of your monitor. So, when you exchange the image with someone who also have CM implemented, colors will show the same. Well, almost because when both of you approximate the monitor behaviour by using sRGB, some differences will remain. If both of you deploy color profiles which exactly match the respective monitors, all differences will vanish. And textures produced will be linear in themselves.

Textures like this will be handled by P8 the proper way as the supposed linearity is there indeed, while in PP2010 they should be assigned a gamma=1. Otherwise, PP2010 will take out a distortion which isn't there in the first place.

So the question is: is the texture at hand produced in a CM-aware environment? You might know, you might not. I don't know about Apple and Linux machines. For Windows, CM is there for Vista and later, XP had an optional applet and before that it had to be implemented explicitely, using the profiles which came with the device (the CD no-one uses). It looks a safe guess to me that CM is "in" for recent handpainted textures, and that portion will rapidly grow the forthcoming years.

And then, Photoshop and the JPG file format have to be taken into consideration. These have their own answer to CM.

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Usually I'm wrong. But to be effective and efficient, I don't need to be correct or accurate.

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