4b2ee0ac50e6519ad920cde8b05a8e95473970c4
An emulsion is a suspension of crystals. Light sensitises some; development
turns a sensitised one opaque, all or nothing. So a patch of film's density
is a *count* of developed grains, and a count of independent yes/no events
has a variance whether or not anyone wanted texture:
mean = D
variance = D * (Dmax - u * D) / N
That expression is the whole feature. It peaks in the middle of the density
range and vanishes at both ends -- clear film has nothing developed to vary,
black film has nothing left to develop -- so grain lives in the midtones as a
consequence rather than as a "midtone bias" slider.
I was wrong earlier that this needs the detail stage. Nothing in it reads a
neighbouring pixel; the only reason to move it was that grain must be fixed in
film space rather than screen space, and that solves itself: N is grains *per
pixel*, so it scales with the film a pixel covers. Zoom out, each pixel
averages more grains, less variance -- correct, with nothing super-sampled and
nothing filtered. It stays in the fused pass.
Grain goes on the density and *before* the dye, which is the physical order
and not cosmetic. Perturbing the finished colour -- what an effect does --
tints highlights wrong, because that noise never passes through the dye.
Crystal habit lives in `rms_granularity`, the number every datasheet
publishes, now a profile field. It measures exactly what differs between a
cubic emulsion and a tabular one: at equal speed, tabular crystals present
more area per unit silver, so the film reads finer. Delta 100 is quoted near 9
where HP5 is near 12, and that gap *is* the habit. Adding a stock whose grain
is its whole reputation is therefore editing one line, not writing a model.
Three things this cost, all of them worth writing down:
- The default granularity is a colour negative's, blue coarsest. Applied to
Tri-X it put *colour* speckle on a black and white photograph. Monochrome
stocks collapse it at parse, where every other per-layer table is already
replicated from the one measured channel.
- Helpers cannot read uniforms. The composer prefixes a uniform with its
operation's id and rewrites references inside a fragment body only;
helpers are shared and deduplicated, so a bare `gn0` names nothing.
`film_lut` already took its size as an argument for this reason, and now
says so.
- The end-to-end test compares the shader against the CPU model, and grain
is stochastic, so that comparison now runs with grain off. Which means a
grain that never left the CPU would look exactly like a passing suite --
hence a second test that grain off is bit-identical, one grain per pixel
moves it, and ten thousand move it less.
Not here, deliberately: no grain slider. The parameters are physical and
`rms_granularity` is the honest place to scale one from, but its range wants
choosing rather than guessing. Nor a film format -- 35 mm is assumed, and
medium format at the same stock is far less grainy per unit of picture.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
DarkRoom
A cross-platform, non-destructive RAW photo editor for Linux and Android.
Status: early. v0.1 is a remote library viewer — see docs/milestone-v0.1.md.
Documentation
| Document | Contents |
|---|---|
| requirements.md | What the software must do — 122 numbered requirements |
| architecture.md | How it is built — crates, GPU pipeline, data model, sync |
| milestone-v0.1.md | The first buildable milestone |
Building
Desktop:
cargo run -p darkroom-desktop
Android (containerised toolchain, see docker/android):
./docker/android/build.sh cargo ndk -t arm64-v8a build --release
Current state
Working: workspace, GPU context and compute pass, adaptive Slint shell, Android cross-compilation of the core crates.
Not yet working: the zero-copy display path. The build currently uploads frames through the CPU, which is exactly what ARCH §6.1 forbids — measured at 96% of frame time at 4K. Replacing it is spike S1, the project's highest priority.
cargo run -p dr-gpu --example bench --features readback
reproduces that measurement.
Licence
GPL-3.0-or-later.
Releases
20
DarkRoom 0.24.0
Latest
Languages
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0.6%