I'm trying to sample from a a color noise texture as part of my vertex shader to make trees move in the wind.

I make calls to the texture() function within the vertex shader, with the idea of using a different color to skew each of the x and z axes of my trees. I expect the values of the red and green channels to be between 0 and 1, and photoshop confirms that the noise texture is properly constructed with values throughout that range and a peak at 0.5. For some reason, the values are compressed towards 0 and I get almost no values above 0.5.

Is there some reason the texture() function does not return the normal RGB values of the texture?

Oops, I suppose it's to be expected that I discover the problem 10 minutes after I post the question. There was indeed a colorspace conversion occurring, because I accidentally had set the source_color hint on my noise sampler2D... which I shouldn't have done if I want to sample it as linear data rather than for display.