Using a single 6K texture at only 227kb in size, spikes the memory usage to a crazy 144mb of memory in Blender.

It was brought up in this bug report, but closed.

I asked Campbell personally and he said:

Why image editors (Photoshop/Gimp/Krita) can handle huge images but not Blender? there are a few factors... I expect others might be interested in this topic too.

So does anyone know why this is, and more importantly, what can be done to improve it?