P: Gradient editor needs a few improvements

1) yes, that is what I mean.

2) yes, that's what I mean.

3) I agree that having real bezier controls requires a much more significant overhaul of the editor, but it will also give the user the best ability to create high-quality gradients for the widest variety of purposes.

I also agree that full control of a 3D curve is probably too much for the average user to comprehend, and I can understand why you wouldn't want to have a separate, 'advanced' gradient editor. But I honestly can't imagine that this is an impossible UI problem, and the benefits would be huge.

However, if it *is* impossible to do, you would get 90% of the creative control by implementing both suggestions 1) and 2) and sticking with cardinal splines, and the increase in editor complexity would be quite minimal.

1) The user can already specify the control points in a non-RGB space. I think you mean to allow a specification of which colorspace the control points will be interpolated in, before being converted to the document colorspace.

2) Again, I think you mean a gamma value for the interpolation before converting to the document colorspace. (and a gamma value for LAB makes no sense)

The example image difference was due to browser color management (wide gamut display matched, sRGB didn't) - not gamma. I should have opened the file instead of sampling values from the screen.

3) I've never seen a good UI for color gradients using bezier controls -- there are too many degrees of freedom involved (it becomes a 3D curve). One might exist, but I haven't seen it yet (and I keep track of all the curves and gradient UIs out there)

This is much closer to what you should have suggested in the first place.

Ok look, honestly I don't care about you being rude and weirdly defensive, I just want the feature to be fixed. Now that you understand what I'm saying, can you get someone to investigate solutions?

Yes, between several of your posts you've provided some of the context to understand what you meant but didn't quite say.

You will never get it sufficiently close for design work, and you will never manage to get rid of those ugly banding problems, because it's a mathematical limitation of cardinal splines.

Ok, here are three concrete UI suggestions that would help:

1 - allow the user to specify a non-RGB color space when designing gradients within an RGB document (for example, a gradient that traces a spline in LAB or HSL)

2 - allow the user to specify a custom gamma for the gradient when designing the gradient, without having to change the colour scheme for their whole document (which leads to huge problems as we see below where you post an image that looks completely wrong without realizing)

3 - best: allow the user to use bezier splines instead of cardinal splines for their control points. I'm honestly not sure what the best UI solution is for this, but it can't be that hard to solve.

Not the same, but close, because I didn't spend a lot of time trying to match it exactly.

You are grossly misrepresenting my statements.

well do you understand it now?

So far there isn't a useful suggestion here. I'm trying to understand the source of the problem, and so far it just seems that you prefer the UI that you wrote, and don't understand the existing UI in Photoshop.