I am used to explicitly invoking the default constructor to initialize values to 'zero', but that does not seem to work with GIL. In the following code: template<class View> void do_something(View const& img){ typedef typename View::value_type pixel_type; pixel_type black = pixel_type(); //I expect zero, I guess this may not always be black... //..... } The value held in 'black' turns out to be 205 (I think it is acting like uninitialized stack data). Is this the intended behavior? I have a slew of code that used to work this way and somehow now it does not - did this behavior change recently? In the meantime I just made a struct named black with a typecast operator enabled for gil pixels. -- John