Stack Images and warnings

[tomczak]

I always get this message when reopening Stack Images. Is there a way of suppressing it somehow - or maybe limit it to one warning per PWP session?

[jsachs]

Many transformations and mask operations still make sense when applied to images of different sizes. For example, blurring and sharpening or adjusting brightness and saturation. Other operations such as freehand retouching or masking tools are unlikely to work on an image with different dimensions.

This warning indicates that some transformation that depends on the current transformation is of this second type and is likely to be invalidated. For example if you have a File Open followed by a Clone and re-open the File Open, potentially loading a new file of different dimensions, you get the warning. If you continue anyway, you will get a second warning from the Clone transformation if the new input image has different dimensions from the original input image and offering to clear all the cloning operations. The warning is there to prevent you from accidentally messing up your workspace without realizing it, so I think it needs to remain.

Another example is inserting a Clone transformation after a Crop transformation -- changing the cropping will then mess up the cloning operation. In this case, you can avoid the warning by reversing the order of the transformations and moving Clone before Crop. Then when you re-crop you will not get the warning.

Without seeing your entire image tree I can't be sure what is causing the message or if it can be avoided.

[tomczak]

It's the same shooting target workflow when Stack Images are reopened. The warning is helpful, but it comes up every time I do edits to Stack Images within the same session. I'm not quite sure what I could do in Stack Images to change the dimensions that would affect downstream transformations - I imagine it's Line, Arrow and Text that may be causing it.

[jsachs]

In Stack Images, if you select new input images it will change the output image dimensions.

There may be some way to defer the warning until you actually attempt do something that changes the output image size, but that would be a lot more complicated and then you would get the warning every time the output image size was about to change.

You may be able to avoid the warnings if you use Blend or Composite instead of Stack Images.