The term 'Gamma' should not be foreign to anyone claiming professional photography credentials.

You should know that it's shorthand for the angle of the slope of the straight-line portion of the response curve of a given photographic emulsion or, indeed, any light-sensitive device. That curve is determined through the science of sensitometry. This is, or should be, one of the foundations of your photographic knowledge. It's the thing that I struggled with more than anything else when I studied photography, but it's absolutely critical stuff and getting your head round it pays dividends.

When you try to produce a print with good highlight and shadow detail, pleasing mid-range contrast etc., the things that are getting in your way are the gamma curves of the original (film) and the reproduction medium (photo paper). If you understand that and can measure those gamma values, it becomes unbelievably simple to produce great prints. I made lots of money in the 1980s producing impossibly good 'Cibachrome' prints because I figured out a way to deal with these Gamma issues, and to do that with a high level of consistency. Meanwhile, my competitors were wasting time and money doing test prints and producing more or less acceptable prints.

If you think gamma and therefore gamma correction is some kind of fad, a magic switch, a religious movement, or something devised by 'the gurus' to make you feel like an idiot, you have entirely missed the point.

It's a fact that image maps, be they JPEGs, TIFFs, PNGs or whatever, are encoded with a Gamma of about 2.2. If the Gamma was 1.0 they'd be linearly encoded. But they're non-linear.

It's a fact that mathematical operations defined in shaders - and this includes bump, transparency and displacement maps - work linearly.

It's a fact that mixing linear with non-linear operations in your shaders is going to be confusing and unpredictable.

All that GC does is ensure that everything in your shaders is 'linear' and therefore consistent and predictable. That's it.

I hope I've made the case for why you'd want to do that. But I'm not saying that you should. Just, please don't start this nonsense about GC being rubbish, why bother, it's a waste of time and all that.

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