diff --git a/toolkit/dataloader_mixins.py b/toolkit/dataloader_mixins.py
index fe2cab46..6cbab537 100644
--- a/toolkit/dataloader_mixins.py
+++ b/toolkit/dataloader_mixins.py
@@ -281,7 +281,8 @@ class CaptionProcessingDTOMixin:
 class ImageProcessingDTOMixin:
     def load_and_process_image(
             self: 'FileItemDTO',
-            transform: Union[None, transforms.Compose]
+            transform: Union[None, transforms.Compose],
+            only_load_latents=False
     ):
         # if we are caching latents, just do that
         if self.is_latent_cached:
@@ -363,10 +364,11 @@ class ImageProcessingDTOMixin:
             img = transform(img)
 
         self.tensor = img
-        if self.has_control_image:
-            self.load_control_image()
-        if self.has_mask_image:
-            self.load_mask_image()
+        if not only_load_latents:
+            if self.has_control_image:
+                self.load_control_image()
+            if self.has_mask_image:
+                self.load_mask_image()
 
 
 class ControlFileItemDTOMixin:
@@ -480,9 +482,9 @@ class MaskFileItemDTOMixin:
             # do a flip
             img.transpose(Image.FLIP_TOP_BOTTOM)
 
-        # randomly apply a blur up to 10% of the size of the min (width, height)
+        # randomly apply a blur up to 2% of the size of the min (width, height)
         min_size = min(img.width, img.height)
-        blur_radius = int(min_size * random.random() * 0.1)
+        blur_radius = int(min_size * random.random() * 0.02)
         img = img.filter(ImageFilter.GaussianBlur(radius=blur_radius))
 
         # make grayscale
@@ -718,7 +720,7 @@ class LatentCachingMixin:
             else:
                 # not saved to disk, calculate
                 # load the image first
-                file_item.load_and_process_image(self.transform)
+                file_item.load_and_process_image(self.transform, only_load_latents=True)
                 dtype = self.sd.torch_dtype
                 device = self.sd.device_torch
                 # add batch dimension
@@ -742,6 +744,7 @@ class LatentCachingMixin:
                 del latent
                 del file_item.tensor
 
+
                 flush(garbage_collect=False)
             file_item.is_latent_cached = True
             # flush every 100