Recently-introduced bug: Masking overlay displays incorrectly during editing after pan/zoom usage

[Michael35807377lhky]

Here's a newly-introduced addition to Photoshop's roster of buggy behaviors: Masking is now intermittently broken when using the zoom and pan functions to perform up-close edits to images.

Once it happens, this bug makes it completely impossible to see even a vague suggestion of the current mask shape for affected portions of the image, forcing the user to apply their mask changes partway through tweaking so they can see the mask outline again to continue editing.

Why do I say this is a newly-introduced bug? Because my workflow hasn't changed in many months, but this has only started happening to me some time in the past couple of weeks and now happens quite regularly (ie. multiple times per day if I'm spending at least a few hours per day editing). I never saw this behavior at all under beta; it seems only to have been introduced with the final release.

The issue can be replicated as follows:

* Open an image with a subject that's too tricky to mask entirely automatically (in other words, any image that doesn't have a night-and-day difference between subject and background luminance and color). In my case, that's silver, grey or chrome wheel rims shot against a white background, where Photoshop's selection algorithms can't tell the difference between light gray and near-white even though the human eye easily can. I'm not sure if the image resolution matters, but I'm not editing especially high-res images; out of camera they're ~18 megapixels, and typically I'm editing at more like ~3500x3500px or so.)

* Click the "Select and mask" button to enter masking mode and enable the Overlay mask with high-quality preview and 100% opacity. (I doubt the color makes a difference, but I use 255,0,0 red.)

* Click "Select subject" to have Photoshop attempt to select and mask the subject automatically.

* Zoom in on an area of the image which has been masked incorrectly by Photoshop and start to correct the outline using the polygonal lasso tool. (I'm not sure if the exact zoom level matters but my editing is usually between 200% and 500% zoom levels.)

* Pan the image by dragging the mouse pointer to an edge of the screen without closing your selection, continuing to click on the image occasionally to keep redrawing the selection as you do so.

* At some point -- again, this problem while relatively frequent is intermittent -- you will find that when you pan the mask will not be shown correctly for a random area of the image, but rather both masked and unmasked areas will both be shown in red, making it impossible to distinguish between the two any more.

* There will be a straight dividing line between the area of the mask that's shown correctly and that which is shown incorrectly, and panning away from that area then returning to it will not fix the issue. The *only* way to get the mask to show correctly again once this happens is to close and apply your adjustment to the mask without completing tracing of your chosen outline first (since you can no longer see where to trace.) Once the path is closed, the mask will instantly show correctly again.

* I've only seen this happen with the division between correct and incorrect mask display being horizontal (ie. during vertical panning of the image), but it's possible that it may happen on the other axis as well.

I don't yet have a screenshot of the issue but will endeavor to get and add one to this thread the next time this happens to me.

[Michael35807377lhky]

Oh, and only tangentially related, but you also need to either remove or fix the following URL, which claims to have a "Feature Request and Bug Report Submission Form" but which lacks any form both when logged out and logged in:

https://www.adobe.com/products/wishform.html

[Michael35807377lhky]

Well that didn't take long at all to rear its head again. (And how little time it took to make the problem happen again without even really trying should indicate just how frequently this new problem is happening.)

I misspoke slightly in my previous description; it's not that both the selected and unselected areas are both rendered the same, but rather that the mask is partly shown inverted. Here, the subject is entirely on the left of the image while the background is entirely on the right of the image. I was working my way up from the bottom of the image correcting the outline, and after a certain point the mask was displayed inverted as shown (so the red portion was incorrectly shown on the right, and the non-red portion was incorrectly shown on the left towards the upper part of the image.)

Interestingly this time when I tried to screenshot it, the problem remained even after switching back to Photoshop having lost my edits to the mask outline because I'd changed to another program (the built-in Windows screenshot tool). In this case, zooming in by one step and then back out fixed the incorrect rendering.

[Michael35807377lhky]

Can anyone else confirm they're seeing this issue, please?

[Michael35807377lhky]

Just to add another data point, I've realised another detail about this bug which also explains my earlier confusion about how the issue is rendered. I've discovered it can even happen when hand-making an entirely new selection using the polygonal lasso tool with no prior selection at all. And the shape of the mask is actually that of an earlier iteration of the mask, popping back into view.

That is to say, if you make a selection, then clear it, then start making a new selection, at a certain point (and quite regularly) the old, no-longer-valid selection will suddenly be partially or completely shown within the area of the image you're currently panning around and making a new selection in.

Also, I've now seen it happen on both horizontal and vertical axes, so the panning direction makes no difference.

[Michael35807377lhky]

Oh, and a workaround, albeit one that usually only works for a very brief period (but can at least let you see your image to finish making your selection, if the mask covers what you need to see.)

To get the correct mask to be shown again briefly without losing your in-progress selection or having to close the selection early, you can zoom in or out one step (I do so using the mouse scroll wheel) and then zoom back in again. This makes the old mask disappear, but it's usually back again instantly you next pan the image or shortly thereafter.

[D Fosse]

That's a GPU driver bug. I saw someting similar some time ago (sporadic and erratic), but a driver update fixed it, and I haven't seen it since.

Just as a general observation, latent bugs can be exposed by new code in a new version.

[Michael35807377lhky]

That theory doesn't feel watertight to me. The GPU driver would need to have your entire image cached at 100% pixel resolution with an old mask applied to it *and* choose to display that instead of what the program was telling it to. This feels far more like yet another on the endless list of never-fixed Adobe bugs to me. I miss the days back before CC when effort was actually placed into fixing the minor annoyances rather than chasing the latest glossy new anti-photographer, anti-creative AI algorithm.