Support for high bit depth RGB (and LCH?) color palettes for painting
Submitted by Elle Stone @ellestone
Link to original bug (#794184)
Description
It seems to me that an unbounded floating point RGB image editor at least needs to support unclamped high bit depth RGB color palettes, even if the palettes are limited to "sRGB only" RGB values instead of also supporting LCH color palettes.
Without thinking, I just tried to add a high bit depth unbounded floating point color to a new "image-specific" color palette, and of course the color was clamped to 8-bit RGB, changing the LCH hue by 15 degrees!
A fifteen-degree hue change is a rather large change in color. There were three other "out-of-sRGB-display-range" colors that I wanted to add to the palette. These four colors are rather critical for this particular image, but it looks like my image-specific color palette will be lacking the 4 brightest of the twenty colors I wanted to put in the palette.
Ideally GIMP color palettes would also support LCH, as this would provide for palettes that can be used in any RGB color space instead of just the sRGB color space. But that's probably a topic for a separate bug report.
Version: git master