D19 retired the per-body base curve, moved the matrix ahead of the
edits and the film into the view transform's place, but a dozen doc
comments still listed the curve among what a pixel passes through, or
said the film skipped it. The detail stage's module doc still drew the
matrix after the edits and the last detail pass encoding, which the
view pass took over. The film crate's README gave the base curves as
its reason for being data, and the ops README's list of hand-written
nodes had neither the view transform nor three of the five kernels.
FR-MRG-2 gave the base curve as why the merge cuts below the profile;
the view transform is why now. The decision table still said colour
defaults were a per-body curve, and FR-DEV-3j said only the default
view transform skips a JPEG, where the node skips one whatever its
sliders say. frame-budget.md records the view pass as unmeasured.
dr-film's README still described one 32³ lookup that took a negative
through the print and the paper, with the sliders' values baked into
it. Since 6b99f67 nothing a slider moves is baked: the curves are one
row per development time the datasheet measures and push interpolates
between them, a print is two lookups split at the paper's log exposure
with the enlarger's exposure added between them, and exposure, push,
print exposure and format reach the shader as uniforms. That is what
lets a mask layer hold film settings of its own.
The section now says so, and that the film's Exposure on the whole
photograph is the one setting that rebakes, because the enlarger's
filtration is solved against it.
FR-DEV-3f asks for look emulation and proposes HaldCLUT import to inherit
the free film-simulation ecosystem. This takes the other road for the
stocks where the measurements exist: run the physics.
A stock here is its manufacturer's own datasheet -- spectral sensitivity,
characteristic curves, dye densities. Light exposes three emulsion layers,
the layers develop to densities, the densities are dyes that absorb, and
what is left is what reaches the eye. A colour negative comes out orange
and upside down because that is what a colour negative is; it becomes a
photograph when a paper profile prints it, with the enlarger's filtration
solved rather than dialled.
What that buys over a LUT is that the parameters stay physical. Opening up
a stop moves the picture along the film's real characteristic curve,
shoulder and all, instead of scaling a number baked at one exposure. The
data cost runs the other way too: a stock is 17 kB of published
measurements where one HaldCLUT is 800 kB of one person's grade.
It looks like it needs a spectral integration per pixel. It does not, and
that is the whole design:
- Exposure is a 3x3 matrix. The reconstructed scene spectrum is linear
in the sRGB triple, so the integral collapses into nine numbers,
exactly -- no approximation.
- The characteristic curve is three 1D functions, sampled exactly.
- Everything after that -- dye absorption, the print through the
negative, the paper, the viewing illuminant, the adaptation -- takes
exactly three numbers in, so it bakes into one 32^3 lookup.
Per pixel: a matrix multiply, three curve taps, one fetch. Splitting the
curve out of the 3D lookup rather than baking one LUT over exposure is
measured, not assumed: the curve carries the sharp shape and the dye
mixing is smooth, so folding them together would need three times the
resolution for the same error. At 32^3 the worst error is 0.003 in linear
sRGB, under one 8-bit code value, and a test says so.
No wgpu dependency, deliberately, and the same isolation argument dr-lens
makes: the model is plain f32 with a documented layout, so every property
worth asserting is asserted on the CPU. Binding it to a texture is dr-gpu's
job and is not done here yet.
The expected values in tests/ came from a Python prototype running against
a different colour-science stack. Agreement to three decimals is evidence
about the model rather than about one implementation of it -- a transposed
matrix or a mispasted observer row would pass every unit test and fail
that one.
Profiles are converted from spektrafilm by Andrea Volpato, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The converter is in the tree and runnable, so what was changed from
upstream is auditable rather than taken on trust; profiles/CHANGELOG.txt
records it, including the one deliberate deviation -- Mallett & Yuksel's
1 kB basis instead of Hanatos's 4 MB table, which costs accuracy at the
gamut edge and saves four megabytes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
dtourolle
