A RTFM moment

When last I looked at linear workflow in Blender, it was kludgey and very much under development. You needed to "degamma" texture images so they were in a linear color space before using them; what you see on your monitor isn't linear due to a fair amount of messy history and chemistry. There are several reasons you'd want a linear color space, the main one being that lights work when you render a 3D scene as you would mathematically expect from your physics class instead of needing to be tweaked endlessly to get acceptable shadows and highlights.

Unfortunately, if you had existing libraries of image textures you were using, changing over to a linear workflow back then was a major pain as you had to "degamma" all your images along with some other changes. I put it aside for a while, and just came back to look into it again this morning.

After spending three or four hours digging through message boards on how to properly use Blender's linear workflow and how to correctly convert one's image textures, I found that the process in Blender had been made transparent to the user (as had been discussed back when I last looked at it). Old materials still act strangely under color management (which is why it's optional), but new materials handle the conversions behind the scenes.

Guess I needed to just RTFM :)

In other news ...

... started a big pot of soup from scratch. It's minestrone, and it'll be simmering all week, being added to as we eat from it.