Chapter 9. Advanced Lighting and Rendering: Working in Linear Space

The topic of linear workflow has been a hot topic over the past few years. In a nutshell, a linear workflow is about creating an environment that allows light to behave as it does in the real world. A linear image is a 32-bit floating point image that has been stored in linear space, which means that it has gamma-encoded values removed and is set in a gamma of 1.0. Working in linear space is used in the compositing environment. It has several benefits, such as being able to realistically composite elements. For example, in Figure 9.1, you can see how realistically a 3D-rendered element with motion blur is composited in the scene. Nothing special has been done to get the motion blur to look so realistic. In a linear workflow, this type of result comes with the territory.