>if the linear data is displayed directly, it will appear much darker then it should be.
This seems more a limitation of monitors. If you had very large bit depth, couldn't you just display images in linear light without gamma correction.
This seems more a limitation of monitors. If you had very large bit depth, couldn't you just display images in linear light without gamma correction.
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)
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.
More importantly, the camera isn't recording blinding brightness in the first place! It'll say those pixels are pure white, which is probably a few hundred or thousand nits depending on shutter settings.