Participant

P: Selection Brush no longer works with Greyscale Image in Photoshop Beta 27.9.0 or 27.10.0

Forum|Forum|8 days ago
July 17, 2026
1 reply
45 views

Product: Photoshop Beta 27.9.0, 27.10.0 (and previous version .8?)
OS: Windows 11 Pro 25H2 26200.8655

If the image is in Greyscale Mode, choosing the Selection Brush shows a circular selection brush as expected, but holding down the mouse button doesn’t select anything - no magenta overlay is shown, nothing is selected. Switching to the Marquee Tool confirms that nothing was actually selected.

Converting the image to RGB immediately makes selection brush work properly. Converting it back to Greyscale makes it stop working immediately, nothing else needs to be done. Selection brush hardness and opacity are at 100%, size doesn’t matter.

This has been working fine for years but broke about a week and a half ago.

It still works correctly in Photoshop Mainline 27.8.0.

CShubert

Community Manager

Hi @sizer99

Thank you for the detailed report — this is really helpful.

This is a confirmed known issue. A regression was introduced in Photoshop Beta 27.9 that broke the Selection Brush tool when working with Grayscale images. The tool appears to paint (you see the circular cursor), but no selection is actually created — no overlay appears and no selection is made. This does not affect RGB or other color modes, and as you noted, it works correctly in the stable Photoshop 27.8.0 release.

Our engineering team has already identified the root cause and developed a fix, which is currently being verified by QA. You can expect this to be resolved in the next Beta update.

In the meantime, here are a couple of workarounds:

Convert to RGB temporarily (Image → Mode → RGB Color), make your selection, then convert back to Grayscale
Use the Marquee or Lasso tools for selections in Grayscale mode — those are not affected by this regression

We appreciate you taking the time to report this in detail.

Thanks,

Cory - Photoshop Product Manager

S

sizer99Author

Participant

Thank you very much! Yes, I’ve been using the first workaround, just have action F-keys assigned for those conversion steps. Thank you for the update.

CShubert

Community Manager

@sizer99 You’re welcome.

Thanks,

Cory - Photoshop Product Manager

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