alt Hacker NewsNo. It's about the shape of the curve. Human light intensity perception is not linear. You have to nonlinearize at some point of the pipeline, but yes, typically you should use high-resolution (>=16 bits per channel) linear color in calculations and apply the gamma curve just before display. The fact that traditionally this was not done, and linear operations like blending were applied to nonlinear RGB values, resulted in ugly dark, muddy bands of intermediate colors even in high-end applications like Photoshop.
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>Human light intensity perception is not linear... You have to nonlinearize at some point of the pipeline
Why exactly? My understanding is that gamma correction is effectively a optimization scheme during encoding to allocate bits in a perceptually uniform way across the dynamic range. But if you just have enough bits to work with and are not concerned with file sizes (and assuming all hardware could support these higher bit depths), then this shouldn't matter? IIRC unlike crts, LCDs don't have a power curve response in terms of the hardware anyway, and emulate the overall 2.2 trc via LUT. So you could certainly get monitors to accept linear input (assuming you manage to crank up the bit depth enough to the point where you're not losing perceptual fidelity), and just do everything in linear light.
In fact if you just encoded the linear values as floats that would probably give you best of both worlds, since floating point is basically log-encoding where density of floats is lower at the higher end of the range.
https://www.scantips.com/lights/gamma2.html (I don't agree with a lot of the claims there, but it has a nice calculator)
The shape of the curve doesn't matter at all. What matters is having a mismatch between the capture curve and the display curve.
If you kept it linear all the way to the output pixels, it would look fine. You only have to go nonlinear because the screen expects nonlinear data. The screen expects this because it saves a few bits, which is nice but far from necessary.
To put it another way, it appears so dark because it isn't being "displayed directly". It's going directly out to the monitor, and the chip inside the monitor is distorting it.