Simple tone curves: theory and applications
James Bennett, Graham Finlayson · 2026
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Description
James Bennett and Graham Finlayson ask how simple a photo's tone curve can be before quality suffers in 2026. A tone curve remaps the brightness of every pixel, and experts often draw wiggly curves with many bends.
The authors define a simple curve as one with at most one bend point, and show how to find the best simple stand-in for any complex curve. On thousands of expert-edited photos, simple curves matched complex ones on objective quality measures. In preference tests, viewers even slightly favoured the simple versions. A smaller underwater photo set behaved the same way. The result suggests camera pipelines could use far simpler curves without visible loss.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | James Bennett, Graham Finlayson |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 128 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |