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Well that didn’t take long. I found an easily-replicable bone-fide bug in Photoshop 9 (aka ‘CS2′). Here are the steps:

1. Create a new image, say 200×200 pixels (exact dimensions don’t matter)
2. Draw a black-to-white gradient from corner to corner to create a nice range for the background.
3. In a new layer, draw a doodle, type text, or draw a shape. It doesn’t matter what shape or color, but create lots of angles and use thick lines or brushes. Center this doodle in your image so that it covers a nice range of the gradient background.
4. With this new layer selected, add a layer style “Outer Glow”.
5. Use the default light-yellow color
6. Ramp up the “size” of the outer glow to 15px.
7. Change the blend mode of the outer glow to “Hard Mix” (don’t change the blend mode of the layer itself, only of the style).
8. “OK” out of the layer style dialog box and you have a nice shape with an intense glow around it.
9. Save the file.
10. Close the file.
11. Re-open the file.

Tada — the “Hard Mix” mode in the outer glow style has reset to the “Screen” blend mode. “Hard Mix” doesn’t get saved as a layer style blend mode.

No solution or workaround, I’m afraid. Keep this in mind if you want to use “Hard Mix” blend mode in a layer style (like I did with the orange/red glow around the words “Birnam Love” in the header of this page).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 18th, 2006 at 8:35 am and is filed under photoshop, bugs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.