Feathering not working properly

[kimamel]

I have been using Photoshop for over 20 years, so I know my way around this tool pretty well. 

I've been using Feathering for almost as long. But today, it appears broken.

I am trying to feather using the refine edge too and I am getting hard edges just beyond the feathered area. This has never happened before and is incredibly frustrating. 

Here's an image with a preview and my settings.

My selection with preview.

And here's an image where I've deleted the selection. You can see the hard edge.

Final result shows hard edge to the left of the feather.

[melissapiccone]

Can you post a pic of your layers for your second image? It looks like there is another layer or something in there. 

[kimamel]

All of my layers are off, except for the one I am working on.

[kimamel]

Also, I cleared my Photoshop preferences, just in case. But it didn't help.

[Silkrooster]

You can end up with a hard edge if it is the edge of a layer or previously selected with a selection too.

[kimamel]

I used the selection tool, but never experience this ever before, and have done this a lot. How am I supposed to otherwise select the area if this is the way it works now?

[Earth Oliver]

It never looks right on transparency... try putting a solid fill underneath.

[kimamel]

That's the problem. I don't want a solid fill. I've been doing this for years and never experienced this problem.

[Earth Oliver]

You know, i think you might be onto something here. Even with a white layer below, i'm still seeing a lot of artifacts. Can you test converting your image to 16bit and see if the same problem pops up? You'll need to add some new brush stroke or masking after you convert.

[kimamel]

This definitely helped. I didn't create the original image. It was a stock photo I was editing. Since I had the original layer flattened, I just converted THAT, then went in and removed the area I wanted feathered. That way, I didn't really have to do much editing after the fact. Changing the already feathered image didn't really make much impact at all. Thanks so much for the suggestion. It's much closer to what I expected.

[Earth Oliver]

Look in your Color Preferences to see if you have Blend RGB using gamma 1.0 active.

[Earth Oliver]

If anyone runs into this issue, here's a link to the origins of the problem:

https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/photoshop-wrong-gamma-when-blending-with-tran...

https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/transparency-renders-incorrectly-in-cc-2017-a...