Quote - Your blue reflects 33/128 = 26% while your red refracts 125/128 = 97.6% (113.6% together)

No no no no no no no.

My reflection was 5% of whatever it encountered, and if another reflection would be examined from there, it would still be 5%. The gamma correction happens AT THE END.

It does not happen during each bounce.

The reason it is 32 is that in gamma 2.2 encoding, the integer 32 is 5% of the brightness of the integer 128. I already gave the reason that is so.

But, during the rendering, that 5% was .05. During the rendering of bounce to bounce to bounce, each value is kept and used linearly. That's linear workflow. The calculations are done linearly. The final final final result is converted to 0-255 using gamma encoding.

There is no conversion to these 0-255 numbers during the internal intermediate results. Everything internally during the render steps is done with full floating point linear values.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)