gammacompressed

Gammacompressed refers to data that has undergone gamma compression, a nonlinear luminance encoding transform used in imaging and display pipelines. The goal is to map linear light levels into a gamma-encoded space that better matches human perception and the nonlinear response of displays, often improving perceptual quality and quantization efficiency.

In practice, gamma compression is implemented by applying a gamma curve to linear luminance values. For an 8-bit channel, a typical encoding is encoded = floor(255 * (linear)^(1/gamma)); a common choice for gamma is around 2.2. To recover the original linear values, the inverse operation is linear = (encoded/255)^gamma. This pairing—gamma encoding and its inverse decoding—allows storage and processing to be more perceptually uniform while preserving a wide dynamic range when displayed.

Applications and workflow. In digital photography and video, images are frequently stored or transmitted in gamma-encoded form to align with display characteristics and human vision. Some processing pipelines operate in linear light and apply gamma correction only at the display stage or for final encoding. Color spaces such as sRGB and Rec. 709 use approximate gamma curves, making gammacompressed data compatible with standard displays and workflows.

Relation to compression. Gammacompression is not a standalone compression algorithm; it is a preprocessing step that reshapes data quantization. It can influence compression efficiency and artifact behavior but must be managed alongside color management, tone mapping, and metadata to ensure consistent rendering across devices and software.