Martino FerrariandClaude Opus 4.6
cc908efa36
A pixel column reduced from a dense envelope is honest about where the signal went and silent about how long it was there: its min and max are identical whether its samples fill the span or pile at its two ends, so a ramp and a pulse are one band. Style::intensity_grading grades it instead -- bright where the signal sits, faint where it only passes through -- by asking the gather for a level finer than the pixel grid and reading the distribution from those sub-buckets. Off by default: a change of look, not a correction of one. The measure is dwell per row, each segment depositing one unit spread over the rows it spans; counting +1 per row instead grades a sine's fast middle as brightly as its rails, which is the pattern inverted. The accumulator is one column wide (a full w*h density image is 33 MB at 4K) with each span written as two delta writes, and normalisation is against the column's own peak -- a frame-wide scale fades the trace out exactly where it moves fastest. Alpha is quantised into tiers, one LineBatch and one draw call each, because the line pipeline's colour is a uniform and a per-segment alpha is inexpressible. The finer ask is floored at level 1 whenever the flat path would have used the pyramid: level_for() answers 0 -- raw samples -- as soon as a sub-column falls under one bucket, so an unfloored ask turns a moderately dense frame into an O(visible) gather (measured at 172 samples a pixel: raw=1154 lod=0 and 6.4 ms a frame against raw=710 lod=453 and 2.3 ms). Grading is a way of drawing a reduction and may not undo it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>