[codelobe]

Remember when .PNG included a gamma correction to try and make a more accurate image -- Appearing as the creator viewed the image...

And then WE ALL REJECTED THIS INSANITY because it made .PNG images a pain in the butt to work with since the gamma corrected image wouldn't match the RGB values of the surrounding document (see: CSS color codes). Then Ye ol' .GIF enjoyed being the pixel perfectionist's choice of image format for the web for quite a while longer. I once was forced to write a script that chopped up a 24bit images into a bunch of 16px by 16px .GIFs (one palette entry per pixel, 256 total).

Digital doesn't usually need to be restored as long as it is replicated often enough (before bit-rot sets in). However, I've got a large number of tools for restoring spinning disks (migration to new hardware isn't easy for the average end-user).

Let's say a modern game came out that had a capability to demand of a GPU more polygons/paritcles than capable today... but in the future those capabilities might exist. Digital media could be improved by adding more/better compute resources (if originally designed to scale, that is). Then there will be curmudgeons (like me) that think things were better before the edge users' hardware became a giant supercompute cluster / distributed storage...

[hinkley]

I did have to help a designer once figure out why colors weren't matching and it came down to Photoshop ignoring the gamma correction settings he had asserted and trying to 'help' by correcting from Mac to PC anyway. Thanks Adobe. If someone is typing in hex values, leave them the fuck alone.