Digital Light & Color

I was thinking, in addition to copy/lighten/darken modes, of being able to clone single channels (e.g. HSV-V or HSL-L to clone textures but preserve colours). This could be done in PWP7 (viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1050&p=4939&hilit=clone#p4939, but required determination.

Also, I'm not sure how to do that in PWP8 anymore - do I need to create side-branches for extracted channels to combine them later? Otherwise, the next extracted channel seems to be extracted from the previous one, not the original image.

Yes, you need to create a side branch for 2 out of 3 of the images, then after working on the separate channels, recombine them. At one point I considered allowing transformations to have multiple outputs, but it was complicated and did not seem strictly necessary, especially if you only wanted one of the channels.

Maybe a Replace Channel transformation would make more sense so you could edit one channel and then replace it in the original image.