This isn’t intended as a doctrine, just some food for thought

For a while now, I have been using the gamma node in Blender as an alternative to the color ramp and the map range node.

There are a few reasons why I like the node:

  1. It is light weight.
  2. It is a simple one slider does all node.
  3. The node inputs are easily exposed in a Group.
  4. I can use one Image texture easily to drive more than one input - see below.

It isn’t a replacement for the other nodes, but for tweaking the levels it is great.
I often use an RGB image texture and set the Color Space to Linear and then use a Gamma Node set to 2.4 to get a more realistic RGB output, 2.2 is the default but I think 2.4 is more colour accurate, or at least I read that somewhere. In any case it often looks better.
Doing this allows for easy connection to Linear inputs for Roughness etc.

Here is an example of how I may use the node:

gamma node tree

Below is the render from the above node setup:

Alt text

This is a shot of the texture I used to drive the node tree:

Alt text

So now you know and perhaps you have a go and like the set up.

As comments are off on this site, if you wish to say something you are invited to do so on Mastodon