The watershed hierarchy does not survive a photograph, so local masking
stops depending on it. A layer can now be one recognised object, and the
object's own coverage is the mask.
`Options::watershed` defaults off. It costs ~80 ms plus a full-resolution
readback to produce a ladder that collapses, and paying that on every
photograph buys a control that misleads. Kept switchable rather than
deleted: the passes and the hierarchy are correct in themselves and it is
the merge criterion that fails, which is a change to one function.
Masks now rasterise in **source** space at proxy resolution and are sampled
by the composed shader after the framing map. That fixes a real bug: they
were rasterised in output space, so zooming slid the photograph underneath
a mask that stayed pinned to the viewport, and cropping moved every
adjustment to a different part of the picture. Doing it this way also
leaves the framing map in exactly one place — a second copy in the mask
shader would have been a second thing to keep in step, failing only when
straightened.
A subject is stored as identity, not pixels: the mask is megabytes and is
reproducible by running the same model over the same image, so the sidecar
carries the index, the class and the score, and the session carries the
pixels. The class is there to be checked — if instance 3 comes back a "car"
where it was a "dog", something changed and the layer is stale rather than
silently masking the wrong thing.
The overlay now draws instances and is transparent everywhere else. The
region version covered every pixel and so hid the photograph it was drawn
over; the question it exists to answer is whether an outline follows the
subject, which you can only answer by seeing both.
`examples/local.rs` is the worked example: subject in colour with the rest
monochrome, and the subject lifted out of its background. Run on a 5472x3648
CR2 it finds two people and two cars, and the colour-pop keeps her hat and
hair while the wall and grass behind go grey.
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