dtourolleandClaude Opus 5
e9b3598841
They were asked for and they are here, but not on the same footing as the
Kodak profiles, and the files say so in their first line.
What I had claimed, and had to withdraw: that Delta 100 is "quoted around 9"
and HP5 "around 12". Ilford publish no such figures. The word granularity does
not occur anywhere in their technical information -- grain is described as
"fine" and "finest" and nothing more. That claim was in this crate's
documentation as though it came from a datasheet; it is corrected there too.
Two further traps found while looking:
- Kodak colour negatives publish Print Grain Index, not RMS granularity.
PGI is a perceptual scale from viewer surveys -- 25 is roughly the
threshold of visibility, four units a just-noticeable difference -- and
Kodak state it cannot be compared to RMS. So a Portra number cannot be
dropped into the granularity field, and none has been.
- RMS proper is published mostly for black-and-white, reversal and motion
picture stocks. Every shipped stock therefore still carries the same
default, which means grain does not yet tell one film from another. That
is per-stock data, not code, and is now written down where somebody will
find it.
So the Ilford profiles are built rather than extracted, and each part rests on
something different:
speed published and exact -- ISO 400/27 for HP5 is a fact
contrast ISO 6:1993's normal development, average gradient 0.62
spectral borrowed from Kodak Double-X, a *measured* panchromatic
negative, shifted by the speed difference. Conventional
panchromatic sensitisation is much alike across black-and-white
films, and this is far better founded than reading pixels off a
printed curve
silver neutral, which is not an approximation: developed silver
absorbs flat, and Double-X's measurement is flat
granularity estimated, ordered by each film's known relative grain
They render as a film of that speed and contrast. They are not a measurement
of that emulsion, and the two stocks that share a speed differ only in the
estimated part.
`every_shipped_stock_bakes` is tightened to match, because a constructed
profile fails in a way a measured one does not: the curve parses, bakes, and
sits entirely off one end of its own exposure range, rendering every frame
black or blown while passing a finiteness check. It now asserts mid-grey lands
somewhere photographic and that the tone response runs the way the stock's
kind says it should.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Film stocks
One file per stock in profiles/. Adding a stock is adding a
file — no code change, no shader, no new operation — for the same reason
dr-decode's base curves work that way: under the GPLv3 a stock should be
contributable without a release.
What a profile is
Three measured tables, all of them published in the manufacturer's datasheet:
| Field | What it decides |
|---|---|
log_sensitivity |
what each emulsion layer sees, per wavelength |
density_curves |
contrast, latitude, and where the stock clips |
dye_density |
what the developed stock looks like, per wavelength |
base_density |
the support: film base, and a colour negative's orange mask |
Plus kind (negative or positive), support (film or paper), and the two
illuminants the data is referenced to. A print paper is a stock like any
other; support exists so an interface can offer papers separately, not
because the renderer treats them differently.
Why it is not a LUT
Because the parameters stay physical. Opening up a stop moves the picture along the film's own characteristic curve — toe, shoulder and all — instead of scaling a number somebody baked at one exposure. A scanned negative comes out orange and inverted because that is what a negative is, and it becomes a photograph when a paper profile prints it, exactly as it would in a darkroom.
The data cost runs the other way from a LUT collection too: a stock is about 17 kB of measurements, where one HaldCLUT is roughly 800 kB of one person's grade.
How it runs
The spectral chain reduces to three tables, and the reduction is exact where it
matters — see src/bake.rs for the argument:
- A 3×3 matrix, linear sRGB to the three layers' exposure. Exact, not an approximation: the reconstructed scene spectrum is linear in the sRGB triple, so the integral collapses into nine numbers.
- Three 1D curves, log exposure to density, sampled at 256 points.
- One 32³ lookup, density to linear sRGB — dye absorption, the print through the negative, the paper, the viewing illuminant and the chromatic adaptation, all of which take exactly three numbers in.
Per pixel that is a matrix multiply, three curve taps and one texture fetch. Splitting 2 from 3, rather than baking one LUT over exposure, is measured rather than assumed: the curve carries all the sharp shape and the dye mixing is smooth, so folding the curve into the 3D lookup would need it three times larger for the same error. At 32³ the worst interpolation error is about 0.003 in linear sRGB, below one 8-bit code value, and there is a test that says so.
Adding a stock
If spektrafilm has it, add its name to STOCKS in
tools/film-profiles/convert.py and
re-run it. Otherwise write the YAML by hand from the datasheet; the loader
validates the table lengths and says which file and field is wrong.
Either way, list it in BUILT_IN in src/lib.rs to compile it
in — or drop it in the profile directory at runtime, which is the path meant
for stocks that ship separately from the binary.
Provenance
The shipped profiles are converted from
spektrafilm by Andrea Volpato,
licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. See profiles/LICENSE-PROFILES.txt
for the licence and profiles/CHANGELOG.txt for what
the conversion changed and what it deliberately did not.
The sRGB reflectance basis is Mallett & Yuksel (2019); the observer is the CIE 1931 2°.