Canon's SensorInfo left border is not where light starts: on every corpus
body 10-36 columns left of it already hold image (EOS 6D: masked columns
0-70, border 84), and the black level was averaged over all of them. The
6D read 2591 instead of 2047 (4 % of the range), so CR2s rendered dark with
crushed shadows; 40D +141, 5DS R +131, 5D Mark II +73. The masked run is
now measured from the data: columns whose mean stays within 1/256 of the
range of the leftmost columns', minus a two-column margin.
Against Lightroom Classic (EOS 6D still life, 2000 px, ΔE00): base 7.63 ->
5.23 (p95 24.7 -> 11.3); mean over 86 edit variants abs 9.13 -> 6.19,
effect 3.09 -> 2.75.
RENDER_CACHE_VERSION 23.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>