# Composition Module

Composition looks at the photo as a whole — where the eye travels, how the frame is balanced, and what could be restructured. It's the module to check before you commit hours to a study built on a weak arrangement.

## Gaze Path

Traces a likely path the eye follows through the image, so you can check whether it leads where you want it to (and doesn't wander out of frame).

- **Visual Weight** — how strongly areas attract the eye in the trace.
- **Stopping Points** — the maximum number of places the eye pauses along its path.
- **Point Spacing** — the minimum distance kept between stopping points, so they don't cluster together.
- **Eye Entry Point** — where the viewer's gaze is assumed to enter the frame — top-left (the usual reading direction), top-right, centre, or bottom.
- **Path Smoothness** — how curved the traced path looks, versus a straighter, more angular route.
- **Pause Duration** — how long the animated trace lingers at each stopping point.
- **Travel Speed** — how quickly the animated trace moves between points.
- **Animation Speed** — the overall playback speed of the gaze-path animation.

## Focus Map

Highlights the area(s) most likely to draw attention first, based on contrast and placement.

![Focus Map applied to the reference photo at basic settings](examples/composition-focus-map.jpg)

*Focus Map at its default settings — the light burst and the car read hot (drawing the eye first), while the surrounding trees fall into the cool background.*

- **Visual Weight** — how strongly standout areas are emphasised; higher shows more candidate focal points.
- **Image Preparation** — how the photo is prepared before analysis: as-is, simplified to high contrast, edge-enhanced, reduced to fewer values, or boosted to vivid colour. Different preparations can surface different focal points.
- **Focal Point Color** — the colour used to mark areas that draw the eye.
- **Background Color** — the colour used to mark quieter, less attention-grabbing areas.

## Negative Space

Isolates the empty/background areas so you can judge whether they're doing useful compositional work or just left over.

- **Quiet Threshold** — how uniform an area has to be before it counts as "resting space."
- **Highlight Color** — the colour used to mark areas of visual rest.
- **Highlight Strength** — how visible the highlighting appears over the photo.
- **Detail Level** — smaller values pick up finer pockets of resting space; larger values only flag big, obvious ones.

## Movement

Visualises the directional flow and rhythm running through the composition — diagonals, curves, repeated shapes.

- **Arrow Count** — how many directional arrows are drawn.
- **Sensitivity** — how responsive the arrows are to subtle directional changes in the photo.
- **Arrow Length** — the maximum length of each arrow.

## Color Temperature

Maps warm versus cool areas across the frame, useful for checking temperature balance independent of value or hue.

- **Intensity** — how strongly temperature differences are emphasised.
- **Show Neutral as Gray** — displays areas that are neither clearly warm nor cool in plain grayscale, so only true temperature stands out.

## Composer & Editor

Interactive canvases rather than sliders-and-viewer studies — **Composer** lets you test crops, repositioning, or restructuring the composition directly, and **Editor** gives you general compositional editing tools once you've decided what needs to change. Both work by direct manipulation on the canvas rather than adjustment panels, so there's nothing to configure before you start — just open one and begin experimenting with the arrangement.

## How to use it

Run **Gaze Path** and **Focus Map** first — together they'll tell you where attention naturally lands versus where you intended it to land. If those don't match, try **Composer** to test a different crop before you start painting, rather than discovering the problem halfway through a study.