How to project an image of high dynamic range? Versions: Blender 2.7.6.2, Gimp 2.9.3 (development version)

I am trying to make a texturing workflow based on using projecting images from camera to a model. In the menu in Texture mode there is an External tab which contains Apply and Apply Camera Image. Both of these buttons depend on bpy.ops.paint.project_image(image=image_name) function.

When I project a high dynamic range image, for example 16bit PNG or 16-32-floating exr onto 32 bit texture image all seems to work well. However when I save the resulting texture in Gimp and look at its histogram this is what I see:



It seems that in reality projected image only has 8-bit information. Is there a way to manipulate context for the project_image to make it output
16-32 bit dynamic range? Or may be there is another way to achieve high dynamic range projections?

Waveforms from a blender file example:

I used a the the same crop where all files had visual information.


Baked into 32-bit texture (EXR)





Camera render (EXR)





Projection of the Camera render (also EXR)
The ability to project high dynamic precision images had been added to Blender's master branch by Campbell Barton. Thanks Campbell!

See the corresponding issue