Photoshop: Make "Blend Colors Using Gamma" a document setting

The settings aren't supposed to be messed with.
Most people should not change them.

And even if it was made a document setting - that wouldn't help compatibility with older versions.

For those who don't understand how the antialiasing and opacity changes are linked, considers this (quite extreme) example: ( I enlarged the image to 300% using nearest neighbor.)



I masked the text with a white to black gradient. You couldn't have the clean edges of the second example while still making the other opacity changes like the first example.

Marc, here's how I had the layers in the previous example:


It appears I was a bit off on in my previous post... you can combine the two methods, it just doesn't look good:

If I understand the argument correctly the best measure for this setting is to have the option for "Blend Text/RGB Colors Using Gamma" turned off until this is improved or better workarounds are found.

This is causing text layer to behave inconsistently. Text blended should maintain the correct opacity even if the edges are aliased differently. I can't imagine there is not a programmatic way around this issue.

I was very disappointed to see this has not been alleviated in any way in Photoshop CC, especially with the introduction of better text anti-aliasing. Over the past few months it's caused a whole slew of problems for me, for example...

1) Making simple things like matching the opacity of a shape and a text layer like in David's original example way too cumbersome.
2) Making it impossible to share documents with people on different versions of Photoshop (or just with the setting turned off!).
3) Preventing developers I work with from directly taking the opacity values I set for text layers to use in web or UI designs.

Please do something about this, Adobe.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Colors at 50% opacity are displayed differently for shapes and fonts.

I created a shape, using #005eb8 as border color and set the opacity of the whole layer to 50%.
Then I created a text, using #005eb8 as color and set the opacity of the whole layer to 50%.

Looking at both next to each other, the colors look very different. The text way more purple-ish, the shape way more blue.

Then as a test I added a layer style to the font, coloring it again with #005eb8 through the layer style. Same result.

Now, when I rasterize the font layer keeping the layer style, suddenly the difference vanishes for this layer and suddenly the color of this layer looks just as blue as the color of the shape, and not purple-ish anymore

How's that possible? Please fix this!

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Strange opacity behaviour of text layers in Photoshop CS6..

Why does a text-layer look that different to a form or a pixel-layer. The color and opacity settings are identical for all layers. I didn't noticed this behaviour in previous versions than CS6.

So, Adobe, how will this be addressed? The current situation is terrible.

I simply cannot use the same amount of transparency for text and a different kind of layer and expecting the same color result? This is not only sad but a terrible UX.

Please, please, please fix this.

Thank you so much!

As a UI designer, I've been really taking advantage of Photoshop CC's expanded SmartObject features; like linking external files and exposing SmartObject's layer comps to the parent document.

However, any text used in smart objects looks jagged and harsh, comparatively.

This might be due to the font I'm using, but the sudden change in blending is disconcerting.

Instead of making a new post I want to chime in here. I see most people here are commenting regarding the gamma setting for text objects, but I want to focus on the "Blend RGB Colors Using Gamma" setting (a setting that *could* be useful but is currently poorly implemented).

That setting *really* is something that should be possible to enable per document, or per layer (like in Affinity Photo). Yes, it is an advanced feature and should be labeled as such (and disabled by default).

Gamma 1,0 gives the most correct/realistic blending of colors, and thus this is a setting we should have available. Right now, if you want to blend a single document using Gamma 1,0 (without converting to a linear color profile) it will not only affect your current document, but it will mess up the appearance of every layered document created since the dawn of time. That means you have to dig into the settings and remember to enable/disable it manually when switching between images. Not nice.  

It also means that if you create a document relying on custom gamma blending and send it to someone, it will render wrong when they open it (as on their computer the setting likely isn't turned on so it blends with the gamma defined by the color profile instead). Photoshop should know what settings a PSD document was created/saved with.