?: Program error with certain areas of SELECT & MASK

[greyhoundrick]

Hello everyone,

Thanks as always for the support and expertise!

I am using Photoshop CC 2017 and Ive noticed that after making a selection on an image and clicking on "Select & Mask" that when I try to use the "Onion Skin" and the "Black & White" views I keep getting the "Program Error" message window.

The other View flyout menus work fine.

Any suggestions on what to do about this?

Thanks so much for your help!

best to you always,

Rick

[Mohit Goyal]

Hi greyhoundrick,

You can start the troubleshooting by resetting the Photoshop preferences.

Refer: Preferences in Photoshop

Regards,

Mohit

[greyhoundrick]

Thank you very much Mohit.

I tried resetting the Photoshop preferences and I did see some improvement, but the problem is not totally solved.

Now I am able to use some of the views but the "Onion Skin" and "On Layers" views do not work. When I slide the transparency slider to 100% you cannot see anything. The image looks as if the transparency is set at 0%. The other views work fine.

Any suggestions?

Thank you very much for your help.

best,

Rick

[Michael J. Hoffman]

Hi Rick,

Can you try this with the GPU acceleration disabled, to rule that out as an issue?

In Preferences > Performance, un-check the option for "Use Graphics Processor." Let us know if that makes any difference.

Thanks,

Mike

[greyhoundrick]

Hi Mike,

Thanks so much for your time and expertise. I gave that a try, but the same thing happened.

I appreciate the input. Please let me know if there might be anything else I can try. Right now Im having to go back and forth between 2014 and 2017 due to the glitches.

best to you,

Rick

[greyhoundrick]

I contacted online chat support and after quite a bit of time I did make some progress.

Im no Photoshop expert by any means, quite the contrary, so I will try to explain what happened and you folks can let me know what REALLY happened lol.

It turns out that in PSCC 2017 with the Select and Mask function if you are doing this on a single layer, such as the background, that it works fine. However, when I would do it on an image that had multiple layers it did not work.

The only way I can get it to work properly when I have an image with lots of layers is to either Merge or Flatten the layers first and then it works fine. I tried stamping multiple layers, but the Select and Mask did not work doing that. It will only work for me (in all Views) when I either do the adjustment on the Background Layer or I merge or flatten multiple layers.

Im not familiar enough with Photoshop to even know the differences amongst merging, stamping, flattening, grouping and linking layers so I need to do some research, but I do know that the aforementioned is what is happening with my program.

I hope this kind of makes sense, if it doesn't I apologize.

During my workflow I will usually have a lot of layers and when I feel its ok I will do a shift+option+command+E (which I believe is called stamping) and then to save space will delete layers under the stamped top layer. Im sure this isn't the best way to do it and I hope to improve as I continue with Photoshop.

Anyway, any comments and input you have about this would be greatly appreciated. I usually would use the Select & Mask Tool to select a part of an image to adjust or to invert and adjust the other part of the image. So now I am guessing if I want to do that in Photoshop CC 2017 that I will need to merge the layers first or else perform this task on the background layer right from the beginning of the processing steps.

Let me know what you think. Thanks for your time and reading my rambling and again, I apologize for not being more familiar with the program.

best always,

Rick

[War Unicorn]

You are, indeed, stamping. It's not a bad technique to use at all; sometimes you may want to see how a certain filter looks on a desired set of layers, for example. Don't forget that if the Layers panel looks a little crowded, you can always group your content into folders.

If you don't have a lot of RAM in your system, that could impact Photoshop's performance. (RAM is the first thing to look at concerning Photoshop's performance.)

[greyhoundrick]

Thanks so much Warunicorn. I appreciate your help!

Does it make sense that this particular tool would only work on the background layer and/or merged and flattened layers?

take care,

Rick

[War Unicorn · Accepted solution]

You're welcome. 

Select and Mask should work only on the targeted layer. (Any visible layers underneath are there mainly for your reference. You can, of course, choose other Views in Select and Mask itself.)

[greyhoundrick]

Thanks again!

Does merging layers, after the need for visible layers underneath is no longer there, denigrating to the image at all? It doesn't seem to affect the IQ, but I wanted to make sure.

take care!

[War Unicorn]

Nope; what you see is what you get before and after merging. The only difference is that the layers are merged.