Hello,

first of all thank you, Elle, for your - as usual - detailed answer, especially 
with your health restrictions!

Being an amateur photographer myself I know about the purpose of the histogram 
for photographers and use it all the time as one step among others. I cannot 
tell much about the needs of the other mentioned user groups, such as artists 
creating art for web and print.

However, I have not seen buttons like these in any other image editing 
software, neither commercial nor free/libre (not even in RT with its technology 
filled GUI). I wished the developers themselves could tell about their 
intentions. At least I found in commit e09e563 from 07/21/2018:
"
- change all "linear" properties to "trc", in all config objects like
  for levels and curves, in the histogram, in the widgets. This results
  in some GUI that now has three choices instead of two.
  TODO: we might want to reduce that back to two later.
"
Ah so, it's in an unfinished state.
To get some input from other relevant software I did some checks:
Lightroom 8.3.1: Article [1] describes how Lightroom handles this in its 
Develop module: it works with a profile of ProPhotoRGB gamut and whitepoint. 
Internally it computes with a linear TRC, but the histogram in the Develop 
module uses a gamma ~2.21 sRGB TRC (they named it MelissaRGB profile). This 
sounds similar to GIMPs behaviour, but with a greater color space. (I don't 
want to revive the old discussions here). I ran a test by converting images to 
ProPhotoRGB and clicking the "perceptual" button which shows the histogram 
using the sRGB TRC. It's visually almost equal to LR's histogram in the Develop 
module and Library module.
Photoshop CC: Histogram view and histogram in Camera Raw Filter look close to 
the perceptual view.
Darktable 2.6.0: No match at all. It shows almost nothing where the other 
histograms have massive peaks.
Darktable 2.7.0+1612~g9e212dc9d-dirty: Shows nothing at all.
Krita 4.2.5: Looks like the perceptual view.
RawTherapee 5.6.1: Looks like the perceptual view.
DxO Optics 11: Looks like the perceptual view.
As it seems, the perceptual view is common. Elles lines read as perceptual 
uniformity has benefits or is required - why?

I think one crucial step to finish the work while avoiding further confusion 
about mysterious buttons is to do some user research among the aforementioned 
user groups and then do decide whether and how these buttons should stay in the 
GUI. Perhaps different histogram views as outlined in [2] could be a solution.

Sad, that the promising space invasion project has stalled. I hope it will not 
end like the OpenCL efforts.

I checked out Elle's CCE versions of babl, GEGL and GIMP for reference.
To build GEGL with the current ffmpeg library three commits have to be 
cherry-picked from stock GEGL's master branch:
Commit 28185ee7 by Franz Brausse, 2018-05-06 13:38,
Commit 02f90ebb by Franz Brausse, 2018-05-06 13:40,
ommit d1a6f855 by Øyvind Kolås, 2018-05-06 15:09.

I hope my lines help somebody to get forward in this field.

Best
Steve


[1] R. Griffith, The Truth about Lightroom Colour Management, 
http://www.colourspace.xyz/the-truth-about-lightroom-colour-management/, 
retrieved on 08/11/2019.
[2] A. Prokoudine, Work in progress on histogram redesign, 
https://gui.gimp.org/index.php?title=Work_in_progress_on_histogram_redesign#Adobe_Photoshop,
retrieved on 08/11/2019.

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