sRGB Colour Space - Part Deux.

In part one, I described what you need to do after simulating light before you can show it on a monitor. You need to brighten it by going from linear colour space to sRGB colour space.

Here I talk about how to avoid polluting your calculations with non-linear data. Light intensities can be added or multiplied. But sRGB values cannot. As Tom Forsyth puts it: just as you would not add two zip files together, you would also not add sRGB values.

If you were to take a photograph of a certain material, the image from the camera will typically be in the sRGB colour space. If you want to render a 3D object that has this texture applied to it, then for the lighting calculations you need to get a texel in the linear colour space.

Fortunately, OpenGL can help you out here. If you sample from an sRGB encoded texture, there will be an automatic sRGB->linear conversion applied, so that after the texel fetch, you can actually do calculations with it. To trigger this automatic conversion you need to pass the correct parameters when creating the texture using the glTexImage2D() function. Instead of using GL_RGB8 or GL_RGBA8, you specify the internal format as GL_SRGB8 or GL_SRGB8_ALPHA8. There are also compressed variants: GL_COMPRESSED_SRGB and others.

Be careful that you do not use sRGB textures for content that is not in sRGB. If the content is linear, like maybe a noise map, or a normal map, then you don't want OpenGL meddling with that content by doing a sRGB to Linear conversion step. This kind of data needs to be in a texture with linear colour encoding.

Lastly, when creating mip maps for sRGB, you need to be careful.