What the copy forgets
The dark of two films, sawn in four

One stone for the darkest part of the picture, cut in four and drawn a little apart: Folie à Deux above, Joker below, the 10-bit master on the left and the 8-bit web copy on the right. Every stratum is one level the file can store between lightness 2 and 10, laid where that level falls. The master's quarters are finely banded; the copy's have sixteen bands. The stipple is the grain each copy keeps, and Fig. 5 follows it through every step between the two.

Note. The strata are what a file can say, not what a frame shows; the stipple and the inks are what the frames showed. Compression takes the grain and leaves the colour; where the right-hand quarters are inked differently from the left, it is because the web copy was graded again, not because it is small.

What the Copy Forgets

What the Copy Forgets: 2,622 shots of Joker and Joker: Folie à Deux, the same frame read from each film's web copy and its 10-bit master.

Scale. Radius: lightness L*, logarithmic, 2 at the hollow to 10 at the rim; one stratum per code value. Ink: the channel that leaves first, as deep as its chroma. Stipple: measured fine grain, in the stone and in Fig. 5.

Colours from Joker, Joker: Folie à Deux, 2019–2024, sampled from 3 study stills — teal, rose and ochre are the channel inks of both colour reports, tempered to paper.

Human In The Loop · humanitloop.dev/research · September 2026

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