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🏗️ Architecture & Technical Stack - CaptureMoment

This document outlines the technical architecture, dependencies, and design principles of the project.

🎯 Core Principles

Capture Moment is built on three pillars: 1. Non-Destructive Workflow: The source file (RAW/TIFF) is never modified. Adjustments are stored as a metadata "recipe". 2. High-Performance Pipeline: Uses Halide to fuse all processing operations into a single computation pass, avoiding intermediate memory reads/writes. 3. Modularity: Strict separation between I/O (Loading), Compute (Math), and Display (UI).

📦 Technical Stack

Library vcpkg (Windows) Homebrew (macOS) apt (Linux) Git Clone / CPM (Source) Notes / Prerequisites
OpenImageIO ✅ ❌ ❌ ✅ (Git Clone on macOS/Linux) Built from source on macOS and Linux
Halide ❌ ❌ ❌ ✅ (Git Clone) 🐍 Python 3 recommended
magic_enum ❌ ❌ ❌ ✅ (CPM.cmake) Header-only (fetched via CMake)
Exiv2 ✅ ✅ ✅ ❌ System package manager preferred
Qt6 ❌ ❌ ❌ ❌ 📦 Official Site (Qt Online Installer)
GoogleTest ❌ ❌ ❌ ✅ (CPM.cmake) Fetched automatically for unit testing

1. Data Management & I/O (Source Manager)

  • Library: OpenImageIO (OIIO)
  • Role:
    • Input/Output: Reads RAW files (via integrated LibRaw), TIFF, EXR, JPG, etc..
    • Image Cache: Handles tiling and lazy loading to manage 50MP+ files with limited RAM.
    • Metadata: Manages EXIF, XMP, and IPTC data.
    • Color: Bridges with OpenColorIO.

2. Compute Engine (Pipeline Engine)

  • Library: Halide
  • Role:
    • Processing: Executes algorithms (Exposure, Contrast, Sharpening, Denoise).
    • AOT Compilation: Filters are compiled Ahead-Of-Time into optimized machine code (AVX2/NEON/GPU).
    • Optimization: Automatic vectorization, parallelism, and loop fusion.

3. Metadata & Serialization

  • Libraries:
    • Exiv2: For robust reading and writing of XMP metadata packets within image files or sidecar files.
    • magic_enum: For safe and efficient conversion of enums to/from strings during XMP serialization.
  • Role:
    • Persistence: Saving and loading the list of applied image adjustments as XMP metadata associated with the source image file.
    • Type Safety: Ensuring correct serialization/deserialization of operation parameters and types using magic_enum.

4. User Interface & Display

  • Framework: Qt6 (Quick/QML)
  • Role:
    • UI: Modern, fluid, declarative interface.
    • Rendering: Uses QRhi (Qt Rendering Hardware Interface) to display Halide buffers directly on the GPU (Vulkan/Metal/D3D12).

5. Testing

  • Libraries:
  • Role:
  • Unit and Validation Testing: Validates core components (Source Manager, Pipeline, etc..).

6. Dependency Management

  • Role: Ensures all libraries (OIIO, OCIO, Halide, Qt, Exiv2, magic_enum) are compiled with the same ABI across all platforms.

General

Windows

Windows

UBuntu

Architectures

📚 Additional Resources