Display-referred

Display-referred means a code value is an amount of light out of the display: 100% white is “as bright as this monitor’s white,” values are bounded 0–100%, and the whole camera-to-eye rendering is already baked into the signal. Rec.709 is display-referred — it’s a finished picture ready for a screen. This is the opposite of scene-referred encoding, where a value is proportional to the light that was in the scene, unbounded, and needs a display rendering transform (DRT) to become a picture. The shape of every modern pipeline is “grade scene-referred, deliver display-referred” — you work with the open-ended scene, then render down to the bounded display at the very end.

First used in: 3.1 · Color science foundations