Hide/Show layers suggestion

[Mike Shawaluk]

When I am working with multiple layers, I often want to hide or show layers while I am editing a particular area. It is inconvenient to keep moving the mouse to click the hide/show button in the Layers window, so I bound keystrokes to "Hide" and "Show" in the Layers menu. This works mostly, but there is a slight difference in how it behaves, compared to clicking the Hide/Show button. First, there is the obvious fact that clicking the button is a toggle, versus Hide and Show are two separate actions, so that two different keystrokes are needed. I can deal with that, but there is another subtle difference, when a layer has live filters attached, the layer and filters are collapsed, and I have a particular filter selected: clicking the button in Layers will hide or show the entire group (layer plus filters). (This is the behavior I want). However, clicking the keystroke for "Hide" or "Show" will only hide or show the particular live filter. Perhaps other people desire this behavior, but I would like a menu/keystroke means of hiding or showing the entire layer group when it is collapsed, like the Hide/Show buttons in Layers currently do.

[carl123]

Have you looked into the...

Layer > Hide Others
Layer > Show Others

commands

Rather than using the Hide and Show commands

[Mike Shawaluk]

That doesn't really work. For my editing in these situations, I have a live filter selected and am making changes to the filter's parameters. Specifically, I have a live Mesh Warp filter, and I am adjusting the node positions, and I want to periodically hide/show the layer I am editing so I can see the one beneath. And yes, I am aware of layer opacity, which I'm also using, but for the node positioning, I often want to completely hide my active layer so I can completely see what is beneath. Toggling back and forth quickly lets me see whether the two layers are properly aligned.

Edited December 12, 2024 by Mike Shawaluk
Fixed typo

[Mike Shawaluk]

I forgot to mention that when I am editing as I described above, the "Show others" selection is grayed out, even when there are other layers that are hidden. Perhaps this is because when I have a live filter selected, "others" means other filters or sublayers in the current group.

[carl123]

1 minute ago, Mike Shawaluk said:

I forgot to mention that when I am editing as I described above, the "Show others" selection is grayed out, even when there are other layers that are hidden. Perhaps this is because when I have a live filter selected, "others" means other filters or sublayers in the current group.

Show Others only ever becomes clickable after you have used the command Hide Others and it does not reshow Layers you may have manually hid before using Hide Others. It just reshows the Layers that the Hide Others command specifically hid

[Mike Shawaluk]

In that case, I think I may have discovered a bug. For my example document, there are two layer groups. The one I am editing is an image with a live mesh warp filter. The other layer, which is beneath my editing layer, is an image with two filters, Unsharp Mask and Brightness/Contrast. If the top layer is selected and I choose Hide Others, the other layer group is hidden as expected. However, if I then do Show Others, it toggles the layer button back on, but the lower layer group remains invisible until I manually toggle the button off and on again. It does this whether or not the lower layer group is collapsed or expanded.

In any case, this action is a bit backward from what I'm trying to do, because I am trying to temporarily hide the layer I'm working on, so I can see the one beneath. I suppose it's possible to change the layer order and put the bottom layer on top, and make it semi-transparent, instead of the other way around. But hide/show others does seem to misbehave for me.  I suppose I'll have to submit this as a bug if others can reproduce it.

[carl123]

21 hours ago, Mike Shawaluk said:

But hide/show others does seem to misbehave for me.  I suppose I'll have to submit this as a bug if others can reproduce it.

Confirmed here on Windows in the retail version and the latest beta

Looks like a refresh problem as zoom in/out will restore all the missing objects after you do "Show All"

[carl123]

Just did a search and it was logged as a bug 2 years ago on AFP-5693
The bug was bumped in August this year on AF-3780

Apparently, the Show Others bug only affects Layers below the Layer you used Hide Others on. Layers above are shown as expected

The recommendation (until the bug is fixed) is to use zoom to refresh/redraw the screen