Gamma-encoded samples are good

This passage is excerpted from Appendix 13 of the PNG file format specification, version 1.0:

Gamma-encoded samples are good

So, is it better to do gamma correction before or after the frame buffer?

In an ideal world, sample values would be stored in floating point, there would be lots of precision, and it wouldn't really matter much. But in reality, we're always trying to store images in as few bits as we can.

If we decide to use samples that are linearly proportional to intensity, and do the gamma correction in the frame buffer LUT, it turns out that we need to use at least 12 bits for each of red, green, and blue to have enough precision in intensity. With any less than that, we will sometimes see "contour bands" or "Mach bands" in the darker areas of the image, where two adjacent sample values are still far enough apart in intensity for the difference to be visible.

However, through an interesting coincidence, the human eye's subjective perception of brightness is related to the physical stimulation of light intensity in a manner that is very much like the power function used for gamma correction. If we apply gamma correction to measured (or calculated) light intensity before quantizing to an integer for storage in a frame buffer, we can get away with using many fewer bits to store the image. In fact, 8 bits per color is almost always sufficient to avoid contouring artifacts. This is because, since gamma correction is so closely related to human perception, we are assigning our 256 available sample codes to intensity values in a manner that approximates how visible those intensity changes are to the eye. Compared to a linear-sample image, we allocate fewer sample values to brighter parts of the tonal range and more sample values to the darker portions of the tonal range.

Thus, for the same apparent image quality, images using gamma-encoded sample values need only about two-thirds as many bits of storage as images using linear samples.