Hello
I tried searching the site for this problem but I didn't find anything relevant. I'm having problems saving normal map files. The baked ones look fine but when I open the file and re-save it in photoshop it gets a bit distorted. I'm not really sure what's causing this.
The result looks odd, the different uv-shells have different brightness and you can see the edges pretty clearly;


The file dimensions are 4096x4096 and I can't save tga files in anything lower than 16 bit(the baked files are 8bit). I've tried with tif too but I got the same problem. I've been using xoliul shader, maya standard mat render and cryengine sandbox 3 to test this problem.
Does anyone have any clue on what could be causing this?

My first guess would be gamma correction in max but since it happens in other apps and engines I doubt it would be that, I have no idea what it could be, hope someone else does.

What exactly are you doing in photoshop?Merging different normalmaps together?Or just saving it in another format?

I was gonna merge different normal maps together and found out about the problem. The problem occurs when just re-saving the file as well.
Could the gamma correction during the baking cause this problem? Input gamma was set to 2.2.
Edit: Yes, that was apparently the problem. Thanks for the help, guys!

Yay, now we know gamma correction fucks up everything