QuickView v6.2.10 - High-Performance HDR, Comic Evolution & Watcher System Release Date: 2026-06-01 QuickView v6.2.10 is a major architectural milestone. This release features a complete overhaul of the rendering pipeline, deep virtualized comic archive support, an automated real-time directory watcher, ICC color-gamut warnings, digital drawing overlay support, and a high-performance Clang compilation matrix. Note: Press F1 at any time to open the interactive Shortcut & Help overlay to review the latest operations and features. 🔍 Robust Directory Auto-Scanning (#192) QuickView now automatically refreshes the image list when files are added, deleted, or renamed in the active directory.

• Background Directory Watcher: Implemented a dedicated background monitoring thread utilizing native FindFirstChangeNotificationW to listen to directory activities in real-time.
• 300ms Event Debouncer: Employs a robust debouncer that groups rapid file-system notifications to prevent UI stuttering and thread contention during event storms.
• Safe Index Reconciliation: Changes are dispatched safely back to the main thread via standard Windows messages, guaranteeing thread-safe, 0-lock list synchronization and immediate visual hot-reloads. 📚 Zero-Overhead Comic & Archive VFS (#186) You can now scan and browse image archives with zero overhead.
• DOD Virtual File System: Features a high-performance Data-Oriented Design (DOD) VFS that extracts and reads .zip, .rar, .cbz, and .cbr archives directly in memory with 0-disk writing.
• Comic Dual Page Mode: Smart adjacent page stitching with dynamic scale adjustments for a seamless double-spread comic book viewing experience.
• High-Performance Unrar: Integrates a single-threaded custom unrar-mini engine for lightning-fast archive traversal. 🌈 Next-Gen HDR Pipeline (#131) HDR handling has been reworked around standard luminance semantics for PQ/HLG, scRGB, scene-linear images, and gain-map content.
• HLG inverse OETF & CPU system gamma 1.2: Corrected HLG inverse OETF decoding math and added CPU-side OOTF system gamma scaling (1.2) for perfect accuracy with untagged and HLG-native sources.
• Branchless GPU HLG Math: Ported fully vectorized, branchless lerp-step shaders to accelerate HLG-to-linear conversion directly on the GPU.
• Microsoft Advanced Color scRGB Exposure Routing: Fully aligned tone-mapping parameters with Microsoft scRGB standard guidelines (absolute HDR at gain 1.0, SDR/relative elements scaled correctly by SdrWhite / 80.0).
• Smart Spline Tone-Map Passthrough: Added automated spline bypass detection. When an HDR image's peak fits completely within the screen's luminance boundaries, the spline shader is dynamically bypassed in favor of a zero-overhead colorimetric clip, saving precious GPU cycles.
• 64bpp FP16 and PQ Splines: Switched the entire composition pipeline to high-precision 64bpp FP16 linear color space. Integrates scientific-grade libplacebo-style Spline tone-mapping in PQ space.
• BT.2408 Exposure Gain & Highlight Desaturation: Reduces washed-out tones and color clipping with standard-aware exposure gain routing and high-dynamic color space desaturation.
• Reinhard Extended Perceptual Mapping: Includes customizable Reinhard perceptual scaling parameters with user-friendly sliders in the Settings panel.
• Highway SIMD Acceleration: SIMD-accelerated HDR peak luminance estimation for FP16 and U16 imagery.
• AVIF & JXL HDR Polish: JXL half-float output and AVIF EOTF handling improve HDR color and luminance consistency. 🎨 Gamut Warning & Soft-Proof Comparison Color management is now fully professional.
• 65x65x65 3D LUT Gamut Warning: Real-time identification of out-of-gamut pixels in soft-proofing mode using high-precision LUT analysis.
• Soft-Proof Compare Integration: When soft-proofing is enabled and you enter Compare Mode (C Key), QuickView now automatically triggers a side-by-side comparison of the original image versus the soft-proofed image (with target ICC rendering profile applied).
• 1s Debounce Buffer: Optimized the gamut warnings with a debouncer to guarantee 0-latency scrolling. 📐 Draggable EXIF Info Panel & Tracing Overlay Mode
• Draggable EXIF Overlay (#179): EXIF Info Panel is now fully draggable across the screen, with automatic screen bounds confinement and layout memory persistence across sessions.
• Overlay (Tracing) Mode: Semi-transparent background mode powered by DirectComposition node transparency.
  • Mouse Click-Through: Toggleable mouse passthrough (WM_EX_TRANSPARENT) allows digital artists to overlay reference drawings directly over their favorite drawing canvases.
  • Shortcuts: Press Ctrl + Shift + O to toggle Tracing Mode, Alt + Up/Down Arrow to adjust opacity, and Shift + Esc to exit click-through. 🛠️ Clang-cl & CMake Build Overhaul (#177) QuickView has completely abandoned legacy MSVC solutions for a modern, cross-platform build system.
• CMake & Ninja Matrix: Built using CMake and the ultra-fast Ninja compiler backend.
• Clang-cl and LTO: Optimized with clang-cl.exe utilizing Full Link-Time Optimization (LTO) and zero-exception (-fno-exceptions) flags, leading to massive standalone executable footprint compression and improved execution speeds.
• Static Single Binary: Packaged with a custom x64-windows-static-clang triplet to ensure zero runtime dependencies. ⚡ Underlying Performance & Instructions
• GeekGlass Context Menu Tuning: Skipped D2D effect initialization inside DWM acrylic-blurred context menus, avoiding massive runtime WARP JIT memory allocations and rendering spikes.
• stb_image.h to v2.30: Synchronized stb image libraries to the latest stable v2.30 and eliminated CodeQL integer overflow warnings in core image loading routines.
• Modern CPU Acceleration: Extended Highway SIMD implementations to take full advantage of modern AVX-512 (AVX3) and emerging AVX10.2 vector lanes.
• Memory Engine Arena: Specialized memory arenas and VFS block pools to eliminate heap fragmentation during prefetch and caching.
• Fluid UI Animations: Switched thumbnail animations to use a dedicated asynchronous PostMessage loop to maintain 60fps responsiveness.
• Fast-Lane Boot (#172): Streamlined window creation and thread startup for an instantaneous boot cycle. 🤝 Acknowledgments A special thank you to all the community developers and contributors who reported issues, shared complex HDR samples, and assisted in testing archive parsing. Full Changelog: v5.3.0...v6.2.10