Lena is Retired

As an open source author, I will not assist or waste time implementing support for any new image/video/GPU texture file format that is not fuzzed, or if it uses the "test" image "lena" (or "lenna") for development, testing, statistical analysis, or optimization purposes, and all test images must be legal with clear copyright attribution. This is one of my freedoms as an open source author.

The model herself has requested the public to lose (i.e. delete, remove, or stop using) the image:

https://www.losinglena.com/

Technically, this archaic image is also useless for testing purposes. There is no one image, 5 images, or even 100 images that are useful for testing new image/texture/video codecs. We use thousands of textures and images for testing and optimization purposes. There is no longer any need to focus intensely on a single image during research or while building new software. Unlike the 70's/80's, we all now have easy access to millions of far better images available on the internet, many of them acquired using modern digital photography equipment. On a modern machine using OpenCL we can compress a directory of over six thousand .PNG images/textures in a little over 6 minutes.

This was posted on Twitter in public by Charles Poynton, PhD (HDTV/UHDTV) after I announced this, after a reader posted that this nearly 50 year old drum scan of a 70's halftoned porn mag picture was being used in a project's "test corpus":

And this was posted on Twitter in public by Chris Green ("Half-Life 2" rendering lead):

Twitter links:
https://twitter.com/momaku/status/1464831801319469061

https://twitter.com/ChrisGr93091552/status/1464853151517855744?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

PS - It's indicative of how warped, certifiable, or completely out of touch many men working in software and the video game industry are that I have received threats (including death threats) over this stance.