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Flowgun
Flowgun
Inspiring
September 16, 2025
Question

Transform Selection bug

  • September 16, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 88 views

Hello,
When transforming selection (Select>Transform Selection) on a regular layer, it seems to work fine and quick., but when doing it on a group or on a smart layer with multiple filters, this seemingly simple task takes too long to calculate for some reason (rendering the smart filters...), although it's not editing the content of the selection, but just the marching ants.
Moreover, when I record an action for transforming selection (or when I use similar code in scripting), the action would transform the whole group/whole smart layer instead of just transforming the selection. the alternative may be the use of "Expand" or "contract" instead of transforming the selection, but that doesn't yield the same result.
My workaround for now is to use code to deselect all layers, transform the selection, and then reselect the layers.

1 reply

Anna_Lander
Community Expert
Anna_LanderCommunity Expert
Community Expert
September 24, 2025

What is your PS version? what is the system?
I could not repeat the issue; the command worked fine on layers of every kind. But meanwhile, there is a question: is it possible in your workaround to adjust the selection with a simple layer active or no layers active, and the next step to go to the needed one? You even don't need to have any layer chosen to transform selection.

Flowgun
FlowgunAuthor
Inspiring
September 26, 2025

it's on Windows version 26.6. and I think I encountered the issue in prior versions years ago.

To reproduce the issue, maybe try adding multiple filters (e.g from filter gallery) stacked together on a smart object so that they would take time to compute. With that layer or group of layers selected, transforming the selection would render those filters for no reason, which takes time.

The second part of the issue (or another issue) is that recording an action that transforms the selection then running it (on a smart object as far as I remember) would transform the layer instead of the selection.

For my workaround, I get the IDs of selected layers, deselect all layers, then activate the modal of selection transformation, then wait until the modal exits, and if no new layer was selected, I reselect the layers by their IDs again.

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