Sensor-clipped pixels are rebuilt at raw decode. The tone map rolls them off to
white at Neutral, so any colour they carry shows only when Highlights, a negative
Exposure or Whites darkens them. They took colour from the nearest unclipped pixel
(dark foliage, lens fringes along branches, pixels demosaiced from clipped samples),
left two clipped channels at their white-balance-scaled clip levels (red or pink),
and were neutral only in camera RGB, not after the colour model (a look fitted to
the camera's JPEG, a camera profile).
- highlight::reconstruct_with: chromaticity only from bright unclipped content away
from edges and from the clip, through a normalised push-pull pyramid; a neutral
estimate blended in where reliable content is scarce at every scale up to a
quarter of the long edge, applied only as far as the pixel lies past the nearest
near-clip unclipped pixels (so a surface still runs into clipping without a
step); clipped pairs keep the estimate's ratio at their clip floors; partly
clipped pixels fade into the clipped neutral on their way from the first channel
clipping to the last; fully clipped pixels become the colour model's neutral.
Pixels without a clipped channel are left exactly as they were.
- engine: the decode colour step as CameraColourModel, with clipped_white, which
keeps the camera's neutral for nearly singular or implausible models.
- Tests in raw (continuity along a ramp through every clip, also as lines 1 to 16
rows thick with no reliable colour, on canvases 32 to 1024 rows), engine
(pipeline renders at Highlights -100, #523's edit and Exposure -2 through the
first clip, over the same sweep; a CC0 ILCE-7RM4 corpus file added to
RAW_SAMPLES) and the GPU equivalence suite.
- Render cache version 27.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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