Serial-stills master files can store /entry/instrument/beam/total_flux as a -1.0 "unknown flux" sentinel (seen in the OCP dark dataset). DatasetSettings rejects values below 0, so opening such a file hard-failed with "Input parameter below min (Total flux)". Reset a negative flux to nullopt so it is treated as absent instead of aborting the read. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>