A sensor speck is not a filter: it is a small lie in one place, and every
slider in the panel is global, so there was no way to say "here, and only
here". The FX row now has a HEAL chip. Arming it turns the pointer into a
circle you can size S, M or L, and every click on a speck covers it with a
patch of skin borrowed from a few radii away — the repaired sites persist in
the recipe like any other edit, and UNDO takes them back one click at a time.
The spot is stored in the rendered photo's fractions, not in the preview's
pixels: x, y and a radius that is a fraction of the photo's WIDTH, so the
circle stays round on a tall or a square frame and the same recipe heals at
preview resolution and at export resolution without a second code path.
`readHeal` is the only door in, and it validates, clamps and drops the spots
with no radius before anything downstream sees them.
The source patch is searched for, not asked for. `findHealSource` walks eight
directions at three distances — 2.6r, 4.2r, 6.5r — and each candidate's mirror
through the spot as well, scores every one with a nine-tap comparison of the
neighbourhood, and hands back the first that actually resembles the ring around
the speck. When nothing fits — a brush wide enough to swallow the whole frame —
it returns null and the click is refused rather than smearing a wrong colour
over it. There is no colour-matching model here and no second draggable source
circle: Lightroom lets you place the donor, this finds one.
The pass runs last on the photo's own pixels. It is inserted after the grade,
the curve and the grain and before the frame, so the patch it pastes is copied
from pixels that have already been graded and grained — it matches by
construction, with no second copy of the pipeline to keep in step — and the
frame, the card and the watermarks are drawn over the result, so healing can
never erase the furniture of the render. The brush is a feathered circle at
0.55r, which is what keeps a repair from reading as a sticker.
SkSL indexes a uniform array by a constant only, so the shader is the block
unrolled HEAL_MAX = 16 times, the same trick the tone curve's mixer already
uses. Sixteen is the ceiling and the oldest spot falls out when the
seventeenth arrives. CLEAR drops the whole field — turning the chip off keeps
the repairs, which is the distinction between disarming the brush and undoing
the work.
Verified:
heal-skia-lab.cjs (scratchpad, Node + the full CanvasKit build) — 15 PASS,
0 FAIL: HEAL_SKSL compiles through RuntimeEffect.Make and
makeShaderWithChildren; the uniform block is 132 floats in declaration
order (16 spots + 16 sources + size, w/h/feather); a dust speck pinned on
the canvas comes back as the borrowed patch while the rest of the frame is
untouched, pixel for pixel; readHeal clamps, drops zero-radius spots and
caps the list at 16; the search finds a valid donor and returns null for a
brush that covers everything.
heal-probe.cjs (scratchpad, the rebuilt app at http://localhost:8090) —
29 PASS, 0 FAIL, no page errors: the cursor circle is 2 x 0.012 x width and
centred on the pointer, L is visibly bigger, S and L are exclusive; one
click is one spot; a speck at 151 reads 154 at its centre after the heal
and the photo's other specks and empty skin are unchanged; the spot and its
borrowed source are both drawn; the chip goes amber; CLEAR appears and
restores everything; UNDO (the TopBar button) brings the dust back and REDO
heals it again; three specks and one L-sized blob all go; the repairs
survive a reload.
Regressions against the rebuilt app, 0 fail: landing-test.cjs 172,
pro-gate-test.cjs 27, award-column-probe.cjs 18, otp-code-probe.cjs 10,
tone-curve-probe.cjs 42; backend npm test 180 passed, 0 failed.
web tsc --noEmit clean.
ponytail: spots live in the rendered photo's coordinates, so re-cropping or
re-rotating after healing slides them — re-heal or CLEAR when that matters; a
coordinate space pinned to the sensor would need the crop and rotation to carry
the spots through. No live brush-size gesture and no colour-matching term: the
donor is chosen by resemblance alone, add a colour term if skin tones ever
mismatch. The list is capped at 16 with oldest-out rather than refusing the
seventeenth click.
RecipesCam
RecipesCam is a camera and photo-editing app built around recipes — reusable
looks that carry a film simulation plus a full set of adjustments. You shoot or
open a photo, dial in a look, and keep it as a recipe you can apply again, share
as a .recipe file, or save to your account.
It ships twice from one repository: a React Native (Expo) app for iOS and
Android, and a self-contained web build under docker/ that runs the same
render pipeline in the browser.
What it does
- Shoot with a recipe applied. Live viewfinder, GPS-tagged captures, and the recipe baked into the saved file.
- Film simulations. Built-in looks — PROVIPES, VELVIPES, CLASSIC CHRIPES, CLASSIC NEGIPES, ASTIPES, ETERNIPES, ACRIPES, B&W HIGH CONTRAST and the LC STREETLIFE pair — each with its own grain and tone curve.
- The full adjustment set. Exposure, contrast, highlights and shadows, saturation, colour temperature, clarity, grain, and an HSL mixer with a colour picker that samples straight off the photo.
- Geometry. Crop to a fixed ratio or free-form, quarter turns, and a straighten ruler, plus printed frames (classic border, retro instant, wall frame portrait/landscape).
- Finishing. Watermark and GPS stamp, EXIF carried through the export, JPEG written with a proper 300 DPI JFIF header.
- On-device upscaling. A Real-ESRGAN pass runs locally when an export asks for more pixels than the source has — no server sees the photo.
- Recipes. Save, favourite, export and import
.recipefiles; the web build keeps them in your account, the phone build also keeps them on device.
The two builds
| Build | Where | Stack |
|---|---|---|
| iOS / Android | repo root | Expo + React Native, @shopify/react-native-skia for the render pipeline, NativeWind for styling |
| Web | docker/ |
Vite + React, CanvasKit (canvaskit-wasm) for the same pipeline, Fastify + SQLite API for accounts and recipes |
The render engine is shared by design: the web build compiles the app's own
src/utils/* and type definitions unchanged, with @shopify/react-native-skia
aliased to a CanvasKit shim (docker/frontend/src/engine/skiaShim.ts). A look
looks the same on both because it is the same code.
Running the web build
cd docker
cp .env.example .env
docker compose up -d --build
# → http://localhost:8090
Photos never leave the browser: grading, framing, watermarking and JPEG
encoding all run in the visitor's tab; the API only stores accounts and recipe
JSON. See docker/README.md for the layout and the proxy setup.
Running the app
npm install
npx expo start # Expo Go / dev client
npx expo run:android # or run:ios for a native build
Repository layout
App.tsx, src/ the Expo app: screens, tool rail, viewfinder, shaders
docker/ the web build (frontend + API + compose file)
frontend/shared/ vendored copies of the app's types and utils
frontend/src/engine/ CanvasKit shim, export engine, super-resolution
docs/ privacy policy
THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md licences of the bundled fonts, models and libraries
Licence
See LICENSE and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.