question about sRGB vs Linear Textures

[Back2friday]

I saw a reddit post about textures being displayed wrong when saved in sRGB. Idk much about this, but i did saw a major difference compared between sRGB and Linear.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/unoenz/psa_make_sure_your_textures_are_in_linear_color/#:~:text=Skyrim uses linear color space,the angles of the normals.

 

How can i save a texture in linear with Gimp? When i choose export i dont see anthing about this option. 

[Dragon on the Web]

sRGB and Linear are colorspaces - sRGB is the most commonly used for pictures, and provides a good distribution of values that accounts for how the human eye perceives greater differences at lower intensities than at higher ones. Linear is a "pure" colorspace where the "value" of a pixel is tied directly - linearly - to the intensity of it, which makes it the ideal colorspace for storing non-color data.
The fact that Skyrim displays textures wrong with sRGB means the game engine is directly telling the rendering API that the textures are linear. Converting an sRGB image to/from linear requires the color values to be transformed, so it's recommended not to do that and to work with the linear colorspace to begin with. However, if you need to convert, you can do that in Gimp through 

Image -> Color Management -> Convert to Color Profile...

and importing or selecting a linear profile. It doesn't come with one by default, but perhaps you can find an appropriate one online.

[PippinTom]

Wouldn't it be simpler and more reliable (result-wise) to just save Gimp output as TGA and then use texconv (or compressonator if one prefers) to make from it whatever texture format you need at the moment? Both tools support commandline so it's easy to batch run zillion of files at once without thinking twice what settings to use, ergo making a mistake while saving/exporting from Gimp or any other editor.