“Live” Split Screen Action Failure

[TeeCup]

Hi everyone,

I would use Window>Arrange>New Window for (document title) to create a second window with my illustration in the past. I was then able to:

1. Proof that window so that it would appear in grayscale while my original window remained in RGB. (This was helpful so that I could color while keeping an eye on my values).

2. Flip the new canvas horizontal while my original canvas remained in the original direction. (This was helpful so that my drawing could remain balanced). So this was basically a live mirror.

Both of these things are essential to my workflow, but they no longer seem to work anymore. Anytime I create a new window, whatever actions I apply to it happen on my original window as well. 

I would be grateful if anyone could provide any insight as to what might be going wrong or has changed.

Thank you in advance. 

[Jeff Arola]

What version of photoshop are you using?

Still seems to work here with photoshop 2024 (ps ver 25.3.1) using Window>Arrange>New Window for (document title), then View>Flip Horizontal and View>Proof Setup.

[TeeCup]

Hi, thank you for your help. Once I realized this feature was still working for other people on the same version of Photoshop as mine, I thought about what I might be doing differently. 

I use proof and flip canvas a lot so I recorded them as individual actions. The actions worked perfectly on a single window so I didn't notice any problems. However, when I had two windows and would apply the actions to only one window it would happen to both windows. So I thought that Photoshop was just bugging out or that something changed. 

After your comment, I went back and tried to do the same thing without using my recorded actions and it worked. So I assume the actions were just being applied to both windows. 

Thank you again! 

[Stephen Marsh]

That makes sense, actions affect the main document, so they would be applied there, not to a new view window.

[TeeCup]

Oh, I see! In that case, this all makes sense. 

For the life of me I could not figure it out and all because of this one little fact. I will keep this in mind in the future. 

Thank you for the insight. 

[Stephen Marsh]

Well I just inserted a menu command for 200% zoom into an action, and this only affected the 2nd view... As this command is in the view menu, it wasn't affecting the actual document, just the active window... So it must depend on the recorded action step on whether it is reflected across both views or not.