The `order` kwarg defaults to `'C'` for `np.empty` and `'K'` for `np.empty_like` (`'K'` means match order of the input array). So you would need to specify if you did `np.empty_like(image)`, but you wouldn't have to specify if you did `np.empty_like(image_not_masked)` since `image_not_masked` is C-order.