Lightroom problem with Photoshop Gradient layers (bug?)

[f31792475]

Hi.

When using Gradients in Photoshop I've encountered this issue in Lightroom today. Both PS CC19 and LR Classic are updated.

No matter the color of the gradient I use, Lightroom interprets it as white. I've restarted the computer, purged the LR cache and also uninstalled LR. To no avail. If I export the image out of photoshop it look correct, but if I export it out of LR it's still wrong. I've never had this issue before and I didn't change any settings, it just appeared today.

If I disable the gradient layer in PS, the image will be read correctly by LR.

Any help will be highly appreciated.

Here's what the image looks like in Photoshop. Just a simple gradient (dither enabled) on top of everything.

Now the import dialog in Lightroom Classic still shows it correctly.

But inside Lightroom:

If I export it, it'll stay white.

[JohanElzenga]

Check your Photoshop preferences and make sure that the ’Maximize PSD and PSB File Compatibility’ option is set to ‘Always’ under File Handling

[f31792475]

It was already set to 'Always'.

[johnrellis]

What you're observing suggests that maybe the PSD wasn't initially saved with maximize compatibility.  If you set that option after a PSD is first saved, a bug in PS causes the file to never be compatible -- you have to do File > Save As with the option set to save a new copy.

If doing File > Save As to make a new copy doesn't help, upload the PSD to Dropbox or similar, and we can dig into what's going on.

[D Fosse · Accepted solution]

This is a bug in the new layer compositing engine in Photoshop CC2019. It's not the compatibility setting.

Go into Photoshop Preferences > Performance and check "Legacy Compositing". Then save out a new copy. Keep that preference if you have problems like this.

We haven't had much information about what this new compositing engine is compared to the old, and what the differences are. But we all assume it will be fixed in an upcoming dot release.

[f31792475]

Thank you very much, this fixed it.

[Charles Lanteigne]

Wow. That is definitely a bug. I was pulling my hair out for an hour trying to understand what was going on until I found this thread by sheer luck.

So what I understand from this is that the "composite" layer that Photoshop generates to embed in "maximimally compatible" PSD files (or TIFF files, because that's what I'm using)—that is, the composite that an image viewer like Lightroom would use to show me my picture because it can't interpret the actual Photoshop layers—is broken. And I can't "see" this from within Photoshop because it doesn't use that composite, it actually computes the layers, which gives the false impression that all is well in Photoshop but that the bug is in Lightroom, when in fact it's the composite Photoshop generated that was broken.

I'm just confirming the behavior so it can hopefully be fixed pronto. Thanks for the temporary workaround—it's better than the solution I had come up with of manually adding a composite layer on top of my layer stack...

Hopefully in the upgrade notes this one will be explicitly mentioned when it's fixed so I can know when to stop using the "legacy" compositing.

[johnrellis]

Add details about your issue to this bug report: Photoshop CC 2019: Gradient Fill is not rendering correctly in exported JPEG | Photoshop Family Cust... . Be sure to click Me Too and Follow in the upper-right corner. That will notify you when the bug's status changes.

[D Fosse]

The working theory at this point - since we haven't had any solid information - is that the new compositing engine uses the GPU for the number-crunching, and then returns the result to Photoshop. So what we're seeing is the result of buggy video drivers, not a malfunction in Photoshop as such.

Only some users are seeing this. I can't reproduce it; everything is working exactly as advertised on my end. I've really tried to get it to break, but just can't.

Buggy video drivers is nothing new. Over the years an increasing number of Photoshop functions have been sent out to the GPU - and most of them have had initial problems because of driver bugs. Most of which get sorted eventually by new driver updates, and in some cases Photoshop can work around it. And a few have turned out to be bona fide Photoshop bugs.

[Charles Lanteigne]

Sure, I don't discount this as a possibility (my GPU is from a number of years back)... I'd have to try it again disabling GPU accelerations to rule it out—unfortunately it would also make many things worse that work very well thanks to GPU acceleration (can you imagine going back to software-rendered Liquify, say?)

What's interesting is that the functionality to generate a composite layer (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E) appears to work flawlessly, so one wonders why there's an additional, separate routine to generate the embedded composite...