While tinkering around with g’mics wavelet decompose in gimp 2.9.5, I noticed some strange artifacts and a little shift in brightness in the image, the shift and the artifacts stayed after combining the layers.
The image which I used is Mairi_Troisieme.ORF from [PlayRaw?] Mairi Troisieme converted to a 16bit prophoto tiff with Raw Therapee.
Yes, @patdavid already mentioned this issue, and all I can tell now is that it seems to be a bug in the way the grain merge blending mode is implemented in GIMP 2.9. This luminosity change effects does not occur when using GIMP 2.8, as far as I know.
I’ve done one once, but apparently it’s gone…
What I did is I created a .xcf file with several layers in ‘grain merge’ mode that had a different rendering on GIMP 2.8 and 2.9.
If you run G’MIC Wavelet decompose and save the result as a .xcf, this should do the trick.