In context of what was brought up in other thread it should be noted: Blender in particular makes the texture look pale when the image Color Space is set to "Non-color", but it will read correctly by the Normal Map node. It can get a little confusing because of that.
Okay, so "normalized" means normalized when in range [-1;1]... I've read there is a packing method where blue channel is discarded, some other map stuffed in, then normal map is reconstructed in material. So if I'm understanding this correctly, this method is rooted in the fact that the map only describes unit vectors, all…