Normal map works different all of a sudden. 2.79

I was working on my model and recognised that something about the Normal-map isn’t right.


It looks correctly and works as a Normal map but this happens when i change the mode:

Can somebody explain to me, why this happens all of a sudden?(Look closely)

Correct description of the problem:
The normalmap looks right when the texture is sampled as ‘Color’ but when it’s sampled as ‘Non-Color Data’, it looks off.

You should mark the point of interest in images with a harsh color.

The problem is that the normalmap wasn’t authored right. It should look right when it’s sampled as ‘Non-Color Data’ and not as ‘Color’. How did you make the normalmap?

I made the normalmap like always: Make a hipoly-model and baked it to a lowpoly model with selected to active.
Unfortunately the normal map is too big to upload.

Then make it smaller.

Is the active uv map the same it both cases?

There is only one

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I found out why it works although it shouldn’t. It baked the normal map too bright. Why did blender do this??
I baked it again and it worked. What did I miss?

You baked a 32 bit float normal map in sRGB and saved it in 8 bit.

Float normal maps are Linear and must be set to that or Non-Color prior to baking.

Yep, when you bake an image into a 32bit float buffer, you have to save it as exr or hdr. But usually you don’t need that precision, so make sure you don’t check ‘32 bit Float’ when creating an image for a regular texture.