How to retain Hard Mix blend mode for jpeg???

[DawnofDave88]

I am trying to figure out how to retain the 8-bit style with blue and purple swathes of colour you see in the first image but when attempting to save as jpeg it flattens the layers all down to one and completely removes said effect in the second. Have also tried saving as PNG, clicking yes to legacy compositing but neither have worked. Any ideas as am keen to preserve the look of the first image?

 

[jane-e]

Hi

What happens if you click on your Gradient Fill Layer and Cmd+E (Merge Down)?

Jane

[DawnofDave88]

Am only able to merge visible and that doesn't work either when i attempt to save jpeg 😞

[davescm]

Check your layered blend at 100% zoom.  At 25% the blend is using 8 bit interpolated previews. On 99% of images the difference is not noticable but on a few , depending on content, it can be significant.

Dave

[DawnofDave88]

Upped the opacity of Layer 1 back to 100%, made a slight difference to the jpeg but still not as i'd prefer.

[Chuck Uebele]

As Dave mentioned, are you viewing the image at 100%, NOT 100% opacity?

[DawnofDave88]

Yes that did lead to some difference in the way it looks, colour loses much of it's saturation.

[davescm]

Yes my comment was about checking at 100% zoom , not opacity

Dave

[DawnofDave88]

Apologies for not being clear.

Yes after seeing on 100% zoom the psd file shows more or less as it would in jpeg format, my problem is the hard mix blend mode seems to be the most affected by this difference.

[davescm · Accepted solution]

Hi

The 100% zoom is showing you the actual blend. The zoomed out view is blending interpolated layers each at 8 bits. A noisy image layer will have lost a lot of noise detail in the preview reduction process. This can make blends, hard mix and other, look very different to a blend using the full image bit depth and all pixels. 

It is not a bug as such, Photoshop has always worked this way and my understandng is that it is done for speed when previewing images with many layers and large number of pixels.

Dave

[DawnofDave88]

Thanks, i'll have to be less careless in future.

[davescm]

It's not about care/carelessness, just understanding the implications of the zoomed out previews and how they can occasionally catch you out 🙂

Dave