We’re using GL_EXT_texture_sRGB in a Photoshop plugin and seeing a very strange issue on an ATI 4670 system, which I can only think must be a bug…
We load a texture of modest size using the requested internal format of GL_SRGB_ALPHA. For example, 800 x 700 pixels, which is well below the max texture size OpenGL reports for GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE (== 8192 x 8192).
We’ve found that only when the texture size is larger than the size of the window from which the device context was originally extracted, OpenGL gives us an internal format of GL_RGBA16F, which loses the sRGB processing and leaves our image looking too bright, instead of being properly handled as sRGB via internal format GL_SRGB_ALPHA, which we get successfully with small textures. The current window or viewport size doesn’t matter; the cutoff remains the initial window size.
We tried requesting format GL_SRGB8_ALPHA8, which looks to be identical in function to GL_SRGB_ALPHA, but the problem remains.
Additionally, when we run our software as a plugin to any editor other than Photoshop, the problem goes away. This made us think for a while that we must have a bad pointer or something, but we’ve checked everything out very thoroughly and are now confident that we do not.
The software works fine under the exact same conditions with a nVidia board.
Is specifying GL_SRGB_ALPHA for the desired internal format the best (only) way to get sRGB texture functionality?
We’re looking at making some trial runs during initialization using glTexImage2D(GL_PROXY_TEXTURE_2D… and reading back the internal format, and reducing the texture size until we get the internal format we expect as a generalized solution, in case this kind of bug exists in another form on another system. Does this sound reasonable?
This has me rather worried that the OpenGL realm is full of unexpected bugs, in drivers for cards we don’t have, and we really have no additional funding for our test lab (which has representative video cards from the major vendors, but is by no means exhaustive). How do you handle ensuring your software runs properly on a wide variety of systems? Big beta test groups? Contracting well-funded labs for testing?
Thanks for any insights you’re willing to share.
-Noel