Weird Layer Mask Gradient Clamping

[liquidignition]

Hey,

So today I ran into an issue where I created a radial gradient for a transparency/layer mask and it was clamping the black and white undoing the fade off/feathering effect.

1.     Creating the gradient for my alpha map. Nice and smooth.

2.       I then proceeded to copy the layer into my mask, except something weird is happening.

          It's seem like some sort of compression or clamping. It's not a smooth feather at all anymore.

I cant find anything on the web, I've tried moving into 16bit workspace, tried different Color Profiles, none of which helped.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[c.pfaffenbichler]

The Channels Panel is not properly visible in your screenshots, please do them over.

Am I to understand you create the intended Mask as RGB content first, then paste that into a Layer Mask? If so: Why don’t you simply create a Gradient Layer instead?

[D Fosse · Accepted solution]

This is normal, if not always desirable, behavior.

A mask is interpreted as a grayscale image according to your working space setting for grayscale.

If you set working gray to gamma 2.2 it should match pretty closely. You probably have working gray to one of the dot gain settings. The dot gain tone response curves are very different from those of Adobe RGB or sRGB.