To brighten the horse a bit, I hand-painted a brush mask over it, feathered slightly and reduced opacity a bit. On another mask layer I copied / inverted the horse brush mask, then intersected a gradient at the top to reduce the background brightness. You can see there are no obvious big artifacts. I’m not claiming it’s perfect, mind you (and it may well not be an ideal technique) but there’s nothing “off”. There was likewise nothing wrong in the ART preview and the export looked good.
But here’s how it looks after I shut down and restarted ART (screenshot):
Note the big circle around the rider (which I didn’t create). The masks are in a Color/Tone Correction module and if I turn off the module the artifact goes away.
Mask #1 is irrelevant since it’s now hidden by a (later) crop, but it’s not a factor anyway. The issues are happening on 4 and 5.
If I display the mask(s), here’s what happens:
#4 - Horse and rider mask (it’s missing the “inside” painting, as if it didn’t save it all; should be a solid fill over the horse and rider):
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I brush painted on 4, not 5. 5 was just a gradient shape with an inverted copy of 4 subtracted from it. But no circles were involved.
Oh, I see the problem.
I think software bug may cause it, but also some unintentional miss operation may cause it. If you can explain your operation to paint the mask to others, and others can reproduce same phenomenon with it, it may be helpful to problem resolution.
Well, that’s what I was pointing out above. I can’t see any unintentional operation:
Paint a brush mask over the horse and lighten it
On a new layer, create a gradient to over the upper background and darken it
Copy the horse mask, paste it on the gradient layer and remove it (“reverse” it, to use graphic arts terminology) from the gradient to avoid darkening the horse
That’s it, as far as the problematic masks are concerned. I’ve created interacting masks before and not run into any issues. We’ll see what Alberto says.
FYI, I painted the horse by first creating an outline with a small brush, then filling it using a larger one. The screen shot shows what appears to be the mask part-way through that process. It looks like the later (larger brush) edits weren’t saved, or at least aren’t being displayed.
You said that Windows restart caused the artifacts, right?
With your file once I deleted #4 and #5 masks, and I painted similar masks and exported the file. After that I restart my Windows, but I couldn’t find any artifacts.
But I use Windows 10. Windows 11 may cause these problems. Maybe cache system or something.
It does it for me with that raw and that arp file. I’ve never seen it before, but I’ve not edited CR2s with ART (I replaced my old Canon 350D before I started using ART), My raws now are CR3s. Whether that has anything to do with it, who knows. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of the arp before I added the 4th and 5th masks, so I can’t “go back”. It makes no difference if I start with a default config. Apparently whatever happened got written to the arp… question is, what and how.
I found the bug, should be fixed now. Note that the mask you shared was corrupted when saved though, so unfortunately you will need to fix it by hand.
Thanks for the report!
but there’s nothing “off”. There was likewise nothing wrong in the ART preview and the export looked good.
