Two things, and the second is why the first matters more than expected.
Mask layers gain a feather, a falloff curve and a morphology, all defined
against a signed distance from the boundary rather than as separate
features — one exact distance field answers "how soft" and "how far" at
once, so dilation is a threshold at -r, erosion one at +r, and closing and
opening are one of each in sequence. The compound pair costs a second
distance field, which is why they are named rather than presented as a
radius that happens to be signed. Types, defaults and sidecar round-trip
only; the field itself is next.
`edge-feather` and `edge-falloff`, not `feather` and `falloff`, because a
radial mask already writes `feather` for the fraction of its radius it
ramps over. Same word, different quantity, different units — sharing the
key would have made an existing file ambiguous.
The diagnostic that provoked this is committed as an ignored test, because
"does the ladder land on things a person means" is the question S15 exists
to answer and it should not depend on whoever still has the script. On
bus.jpg it answers badly: 35,075 regions at blur 2 over an 810x1080 frame,
and cutting that to 400 gives *one* region covering nearly the whole
picture plus 399 noise specks. Not over-segmentation — collapse. Almost
every saddle is near zero, so the merge order joins everything meaningful
before it joins anything spurious, and a global cut spends its entire
budget on grain.
So the granularity ladder does not currently work on a photograph, and the
region masks built on it inherit that. Recorded rather than worked around:
the next commits move local masking onto the model's instances, where the
edge treatment above is what makes a quarter-resolution mask usable.
A mask layer holds a real develop chain, so the develop panel can edit one
with no new controls: select a layer and the same sliders read and write
its chain instead of the graph's. An operation declared in `ops/` tomorrow
becomes locally adjustable by existing, which is the payoff for making a
layer a chain rather than a handful of special-cased parameters.
`segmentation.rs` joins the two arms into the one thing the view needs.
The model reads the image through a neutral graph rather than the edited
one, so a segmentation survives an exposure change instead of being
invalidated by every slider. Arm B failing is not fatal: a missing or
unreadable model leaves a working watershed map, because refusing to
segment at all would trade a working feature for a strict one.
The overlay colours groups by a golden-angle walk over hue. Deterministic
rather than random, so a region keeps its colour across a level change and
the eye can track it; boundaries drawn black over the fill, because two
adjacent groups landing on near hues read as one region and telling them
apart is the whole reason to look at it.
Clicking the photograph creates the layer if none is selected — that is how
a local adjustment begins, and making the user press "add layer" first
would be a step with no decision in it. Shift-click extends, and clicking a
region already selected removes it, so one gesture both adds and corrects.
`segment-readback` is a new dr-gpu feature and not a loosening of
`readback`. The region-graph transfer is once per image on a worker; the
one AC-8 forbids is per frame in the render loop. Sharing a switch would
have forced a build wanting local masking to unlock the other. F3 still
stands and the feature name says so.
A mask layer is an ordinary develop chain plus a rule about where it
applies. Nothing in the chain knows it is being masked, so every operation
that works globally now works locally and a newly declared op in `ops/`
arrives with local support already done.
The composer emits each layer after the global chain and before the
conversion out of camera space, which is what a photographer means by "and
*then* lift the shadows on her face". Op fragments write to a `c` they
expect to own, so a layer block shadows it and copies the result back out
through a carrier — assigning the outer one from inside is impossible
precisely because it is shadowed. The fused dispatch survives: three global
adjustments and two masked ones remain one shader, one read, one write.
Masks rasterise on the GPU and never exist in CPU memory (ARCH §5.4). That
is the whole reason darktable's brush masks lag, and it is architectural
rather than tuning, so it is not a thing to inherit and fix later.
The rasteriser is a render pass rather than the compute shader it obviously
wants to be, and the format is why: R8Unorm is not a core storage format,
so a compute path has to widen masks to four bytes per pixel — 768 MB
across eight layers of a 24 MP export, against 192 MB at one byte. A colour
attachment takes R8Unorm happily. The array slice comes from the attached
view, so no slot uniform exists to disagree with where the pass writes.
Region masks index a compacted label field rather than the watershed's raw
basin roots, because a root is a sparse index into pixel space and
indexing a per-region array by one would need a table the size of the
image. Changing a selection then costs a few kilobytes, not a re-upload.
Stored as region ids, not as pixels: diffable, mergeable per-field under
FR-NC-9, and cheap in a sidecar. The ids only mean anything alongside the
segmentation that produced them, so each layer carries that signature and
is treated as stale rather than applied when it does not match — a
confidently wrong mask being much worse than an absent one.
Seven device tests render actual frames and read them back. The unit tests
either side check halves that would both pass if the two agreed with each
other and were both wrong; a mask sampled with x and y swapped satisfies
them and fails these.
dtourolle