This is something that I investigated more than 5 years ago as I knew it might affect interpolation.  I ran many tests and in the end, I found it best to just interpolate the image without worrying about gamma.  Take a look at all the examples in the links you posted.  They are all oddball images where every other line/pixel has been removed or zeroed out.  Those are not "real world" examples that you will ever see in a photograph but people use those examples because they are the only examples that really show a significant difference.  Those examples exploit the fact that wide variations between adjacent pixels can cause non-gamma-corrected interpolation algorithms to go awry.  In real photos, you'll never see such large variations between adjacent pixels in photographs from digital cameras or scanners.  The image acquisition on those devices is simply not capable of rendering huge per-pixel contrast changes and even when they come close, the changes are at a sharp edge where the difference will likely go unnoticed anyway.  The bottom line is that there is almost never a visible difference between images interpolated with or without gamma manipulation.  Even in cases where there is some difference, you have to switch back and forth between both images, staring at them, and then you might eventually be able to point out a hard edge somewhere that looks slightly different and you might say "I think I might see a difference here".

Doing gamma corrected interpolation has other trade-offs as well.  Do you know the gamma of your photos?  You think you do, but in reality, you do not!  The gamma curve is totally dependent on the tone curve used by the camera/scanner and that can change under different lighting sources.  Many cameras "crush" the dark end too in order to reduce noise, and that modifies the tone curve such that it doesn't follow a true gamma 2.2 curve.  In addition, does your camera use a straight gamma or a linear corrected gamma per Rec 709?  Some people think that gamma is a straight power(1/2.2) curve.  Most devices do not use that curve even when they are called gamma 2.2: they modify that curve with a linear segment at the low end.  Some of these articles I've seen don't even account for the proper gamma curve!  Does your camera use a gamma 2.2 curve?  Most likely not.  Is gamma correcting to 2.2 better than doing nothing at all?  Maybe.  Maybe not!  In the end, my decision was that guessing at the tone curve and making gamma manipulations based on an unknown curve wasn't worth the extra processing when the end result didn't vary significantly for photos.

The links you point to make a good "look at what trick I can do" but they are nothing more than a curiosity when it comes to real photographs as most of what is there does not apply and won't cause any problem in our photos.  You can easily test this yourself.  Just use Qimage's batch filter, open an image, and drag the "M" levels slider to .45 and interpolate.  Save the interpolated image.  Then open that image and slider the "M" slider to 2.2 and the result will be your gamma corrected/interpolated image.  Compare that to an image with "straight" interpolation.  Unless you are dealing with a mathematically derived image with alternating closely spaced pixels, there will be no visible difference that appreciably affects the image.  Try it for yourself.

Keep in mind that this is a very easy thing to do.  I could easily add a "Use gamma correction" checkbox on the Qimage interpolation dialog and have it working in just a few minutes, so I would have already done it if I thought it really made a positive difference.  Fact is, given the complexity (and errors) in the tone curves of most cameras, assuming the wrong gamma curve can actually cause more harm than good and considering the minor differences it elicits in real photos anyway, it just seemed like a "clutter" feature.

Mike

Mike,

You have answered my question. I had some doubts about the gamma issue and the samples provided. The uncertainty about the actual gamma curve used like you explained would make any "solution" a gamble.

What I observed in smaller versus larger prints from the same file is still there though.



met vriendelijke groeten, Ernst Dinkla

Dinkla Gallery Canvas Wrap Actions for Photoshop
http://www.pigment-print.com/dinklacanvaswraps/index.html