Passing camera background color to a shader, linear / gamma correction issue

Unity Engine
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1

My project uses linear rendering. I’m passing the camera background color into a shader. If I simply return that same color from the shader, the color is much brighter - see the square in this image (running in the editor):

colors-off
colors-off173×160 1.51 KB

I would expect that square to be essentially invisible. (This is an example, of course - I don’t actually want to render invisible objects.)
It turns out, if I apply GammaToLinearSpace() to the color before returning it, the result is correct.

So, I am unsure why this is necessary. If I sample the background color from the screen, the values are exactly the same that I see in the camera inspector, suggesting there isn’t any gamma correction at all (as I would expect).

I am a little confused about what is going on here, and would be grateful for pointers / explanations.

Thanks!

2

Not sure if this is the cause, but try changing the color space in Player Settings.

3

The problem doesn’t appear with gamma color space. I’d just really like to know why I have to make this correction when using linear rendering. The documentation is a little sparse on the topic.