A linear mask at 45° was not at 45°, and a radial with equal radii was an
ellipse. Both on every photograph that is not square, which is all of them.
The geometry is stored in normalised coordinates so that a mask survives a
crop, a zoom and an export at another size — that part was right. What was
wrong is that a *distance* was being measured in those coordinates too, and a
fraction of the width is not the same length as a fraction of the height. So
`dot(uv - centre, axis)` measured the ramp in a space one of whose axes is
squashed against the other by the aspect ratio, and the iso-lines came out
sheared: on a 3:2 frame a ramp asked for at 45° arrives at about 34°.
Nothing announces it. The stored numbers are exactly what was written, the
shader is doing exactly what it says, and the only place the fault exists is
between the photographer's intent and the picture. It has been invisible so far
because there is no way yet to place a gradient by eye — the handles that make
it visible are what turned it up.
So distances and angles move into the frame's own isotropic units: y spans
`0..1` and x spans `0..aspect`, which makes a circle round and 45° a real
diagonal. The centre stays a plain fraction of each axis, because it is a point
and a point has no such problem — and because that is the space a click arrives
in. `frame_delta` is the one conversion and must stay the only one; the mask
array's own dimensions carry the aspect, so it costs no uniform.
The sidecar format does not change. What changes is what the numbers mean, and
the only geometry in the wild is a default that has never been movable.
The two tests are at 96×64 rather than square, which is the whole point: on a
square target this bug cannot be reproduced, and every existing mask test was
square. Both fail without the conversion — the radial reaching 28px sideways
where it reaches 19px down, and the diagonal landing on the wrong side of the
line it is supposed to lie along.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Reported as a thumbnail bug; the export had it too, which is the serious
half. You would have exported a photograph missing every local adjustment.
Both called the unmasked `render`, and the failure is silent by
construction: the generated shader always declares the mask binding and
always emits a block per active layer, so binding the empty placeholder
multiplies each of them by zero. No error, no warning, no missing texture —
the adjustments are simply not there. From inside either path there is
nothing to see.
Every path that produces pixels now goes through one helper that binds the
array, and that is the point of it being one helper rather than three
correct call sites. The array is rasterised in source space at proxy size
and sampled through the framing map, so one array serves every output size:
a 256px thumbnail and a 24 MP export bind the same texture.
Three tests, and the first is the fault stated directly — render the same
edit with and without the array and assert they *differ*. If binding it ever
stops mattering, the masks have stopped reaching the shader. The third
checks the masked share of the frame is the same at 32px and 128px, because
"both non-empty" would pass while a mask that scaled wrongly still ruined
every thumbnail.
dtourolleandClaude Opus 5