I had a whole reply, but apparently you can’t reply by email on the DxO forums.
Anyway, the versions causing different behaviour is more likely then my original thought.
I still consider it a bug that if you copy the preset , all those special behaviours do get written to your new preset (good), but there is no method in the GUI to control if the constrain flag is in the preset or not (bad).
The only method to control that, is editing the preset in a text editor. Bug, oversight , whatever. Not good UX at least :).
As why some people experience this differently… Yes. Maybe windows and Mac differences. There are lots.
Could also be - those presets are written in your user settings. So maybe they are not always updated during an install/ upgrade. So maybe some people have older versions of them , because they only get written on first start if they don’t exist yet? I’m just speculating though.
My version showed 11 or something for my system preset , but something way higher for a new empty preset. Maybe people exist out there wit
h higher versions of the factory presets.
It all ends up to the same though : if you have a user preset that toggles the ‘constrain’ flag and you dont want that, create a new empty preset and recreate your user preset , or edit the preset file and restart DxO PL if your comfortable with that .
And for DxO: it should be possible to control if the constrain flag is modified or not without having to edit the preset file . You can control if the distort module is included in a preset or not , but the constrain to image is a separate setting that has no UI counterpart to include or exclude from a preset.
DistortionAnamorphosisKeepEntireImage=false means ‘constrain to image is forced on’.
DistortionAnamorphosisKeepEntireImage=true means force it to off.
Removing that line all together from a preset means ‘leave it alone’.
And exactly that last state has no UI in the preset editor .
That also means that people copying a factory preset to then edit it , don’t have control over this, and you can’t see what is happening .
From programming myself , having a version number in a preset ro replicate program behaviour from that era to stay backwards compatible , sounds like a normal, logical thing to do.
The constrain to image has seen some differences in the PL 6 release cycle , so I kinda understand that the flag behaves differently depending on the version the preset has.
No way to alter it if bringing the preset to a newer version is the problem, although like is said, with a text editor you can work around it.
@John-M the only experiment is to see if newer versions of those factory presets are written if you have a new complete fresh install. But I don’t care enough to try it to be honest :).