Win10 PS21 22 | Groups and alphas still have years old issues. Please take a look

[dzigakaiser]

Good morning!

I have posted and bumped this multiple times over on feedback.photoshop.com with no avail and I shall try again. There is alpha issues when working with "Blend RGB colors using gamma 1.0".

I attached a small example file. In that file is a background and a group containing cloud layers.

The group is set to normal which in the past meant that merging it will not change the appearance as all layers only act inside this group without influence of the layers below.

I have found multiple issues but I will focus on the two most annoying ones:
1. Adding a layer mask will change the alpha of the group content (try it by enabling/disabling the pure white mask).
2. Clipping any layer to the group will change the alpha as well. Just create an empty layer and clip it and the clouds are much more visible suddenly.

Those two issues are very annoying to work with as I have to merge my top level groups and export them as separate layers. But merging the groups will change the alpha again.
The only way I have found so far to salvage this cloud group, for example, is to tediously merge the group contents first (not the group but all layers inside), then move the merged layer outside of the group, move the layer mask onto this merged layer and rename the layer to the group's name.
And then do that when you have a matte painting with 30 layers to be merged 😕

Can someone of Adobe's development team please take a look at this finally 😞 I don't know when exactly this bug appeared but I did not have the issue ~4 years ago and those type of things are why I am trying hard to exclude Photoshop completely from my workflows (among many other bugs).

I tried the file in 21.2.4 and 22.0. When I posted over a year ago I may have had access to earlier versions but I can't find the post as my history did not get migrated even though I used the same email on feedback.photoshop.com as here.

If you do test the file, make sure you set Blend RGB Colors Using Gamma 1.0 in the color settings.

Please let me know if you need further info to investigate.

Thank you,

Dziga

[dzigakaiser]

Here is the file, upload didn't work when creating the thread.

[PECourtejoie]

Hello, Blend using Gamma 1.0 is not a default setting...

I found there discussions on the topic: https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem/blend-rgb-colors-using-gamma-1-0-issue-with-group...

Do you mean that older versions did not blend/flatten images the same way?

If you still have Ps 21, can you check "legacy compositing" in Preferences>Performance (then restart) to see if it changes the behaviour?

[dzigakaiser]

Hi! 
Thank you for taking the time to search one of the old threads!
I never claimed it to be a default setting. Does it mean that if it is not default and the behaviour is weird and seems more like a bug we shouldn't point it out?^^

Anyway, I tried legacy compositing in 21.2.4 and the merging shows the same issue. Only the mask and layer clipping issue is gone. I am relatively sure that flattening/merging groups always had slight effects happen but not as extreme as it is the past few years.

In general I am just genuinely curious if that is a technical limit or if this can be solved.