After installing Lion, selections with the Rectangular Marquee Tool generally are reduced by one pixel when the mouse button is released. For example, dragging a 25x25px square results in a 24x25px selection.
It appears this issue was solved by a fix to the drivers released with Mac OS X 10.8.3 or later. Let us know if you're using a version of OS X 10.8.3 or later and still seeing this issue.
I have this problem, too, and it's made doing accurate UI work with Photoshop utterly maddening.
Potentially related, selections were also off pre-Lion when using OpenGL rendering. Disabling OpenGL and restarting Photoshop fixed the selection issue pre-Lion, but the issue is there in Lion with or without OpenGL.
The issue occurs for me under both CS5 and CS5.5 only at 100% zoom. (Higher zoom levels seem to have accurate selections, and lower zoom levels are ambiguous). It occurs with a freehand rectangle selection as well as Fixed Size selections.
Here's a quick video of the bug in action:
http://static.command-tab.com/temp/bu...
In all cases, I was careful to create a selection at 100% zoom that was *dead on* matching the blue square. Yet, when I released the mouse button to confirm my selection, it jumped and missed my carefully-aimed target by a pixel. More often than not, it misses by moving my whole selection up or by just raising the bottom edge of my selection by one pixel.
For someone who does pixel accurate work, it's frustrating to have to make a selection two, three, four times or more to get the size to "stick".
What machine are you using, and what video card/chip? We've seen that bug before and it was specific to certain GPU versions (ie: a bug in the driver).
I'm using a 2.66 GHz Late 2009 Quad Core i5 27" iMac (iMac11,1) with an ATI Radeon HD 4850 (512 MB) GPU.
Possibly related, I encounter this bug with Photoshop's "Enable OpenGL Drawing" turned off under Preferences -> Performance. With OpenGL drawing turned on, both the in-progress creation *and* completed selection don't match my cursor positions exactly. I typically turn off OpenGL drawing because it decreases marquee selection accuracy, and did so even before this Lion & CS5+ bug manifested. The two may be related, though. It would definitely be worth looking into. I can create another screencap with OpenGL turned on, if needed.
I can reproduce this. It's a little more subtle with OGL off but it definitely occurs with OGL on and off. Thanks for the demo video, Collin. I'll log a bug report on this.
I'm not sure if this is related, but the eyedropper tool for me exhibits a strange pixel shift at times in Lion, in both Photoshop CS5 and CS5.1. Sometimes, the preview circle will shift one pixel from where the cursor is, and show the color of that pixel instead. When I let go of the mouse button, the color that the cursor is actually on does get selected though. Sometimes it works fine, sometimes it looks like it shifts the circle over to the right, sometimes one pixel down, sometimes down and to the right. I can see the circle actually move right after it appears. I took a screen recording of this happening, the odd thing is that although I was 100% sure my cursor was on the rightmost edge of the blue square, in the recording, it shows it on the white part to the right of the square. You can see when the mouse is released though, that blue is the foreground color, not white like the circle shows should be. This never happened in Snow Leopard.
This is extremely frustrating. I used to be able to zip around with great accuracy (and always touted the wonderful "feel" of adobe products because of the pixel accuracy - when drawing bezier curves, for example). I do pixel-perfect work and this is driving me nuts. :(
2011 3.4GHz i7 iMac with AMD Radeon HD 6970M
OS X Lion 10.7.1
Photoshop CS 5.1
When I make a selection, the selection displays one pixel off from where it should be. As seen in the screenshot below the selection is actually flush to the right edge of the canvas even though it displays 1px off. If I pan the screen around the gap goes away in some spots which leads me to believe this is some sort of compatibility issue between certain Radeon cards and Photoshop.
I have searched around and it would seem many people have experienced this issue. All of my software is up to date. If I turn off OpenGL then this display issue goes away, however this is not a fix. A brand new top of the line iMac should have no problem running Photoshop. The problem also does not seem to be isolated to CS 5.1 or OS X 10.7.1.
Here are some screen shots to better illustrate the OpenGL problem with many Macs. The selection marquee is offset 1 pixel right and 1 pixel down while drawing. Once the mouse is released, the marquee snaps in position on the horizontal axis, but remains off in the vertical axis.
Changing the OpenGL options has no effect on this behavior.
This is so crazy there is a topic for this, I just assumed it was broken on my machine, but the fact that so many users are having issues with it, well, it's kind disheartening. I'm a designer so when things are inaccurate my work suffers, if my work suffers I don't get paid, ipso facto, I get hungry. Little help adobe! Your products rock!
We're investigating this issue. As a workaround, if you base your selection on the cursor position instead of the marching ants positions, the selection should still be faithful to the cursor position on mouse-up.
For rectangular marquee? If you give me your graphics card I can see if I can reproduce that. That would be a slightly different behavior from what's mentioned here. The final drawn marquee should still be drawing at the crosshairs of the cursor position on mouse up.
Seconded. I see the issue exactly as I video-captured (above) on my 2.13 GHz Late 2010 MacBook Air with an NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256 MB card. That makes two machines for me as well, with different graphics card manufacturers.
Chris, I think what we're all hoping for here is that, if it's an Apple bug that's affecting Photoshop, we'd like to see Adobe work with Apple to get the issue resolved. And if it's not an Apple bug, we'd like a fix from Adobe for the issue.