Preserve transparency when padding and expanding images - #9995

ImageOps.pad() and ImageOps.expand() discard info["transparency"] when creating an image with a border. Transparent pixels consequently become opaque in P, L and RGB images, including when the result is saved as PNG.

Changes proposed in this pull request:

• Preserve the transparency value in the shared _new_with_fill() helper and pass the source image when allocating a new palette color, so reserved transparency indices are not reused for the border.
• Make palette allocation also avoid transparent and translucent entries in byte-valued transparency data, both when extending a palette and when reusing an unused slot in a full palette.
• Test palette transparency indices and transparency bytes, grayscale/RGB transparent colors, horizontal/vertical padding and expansion. Check the original pixels, border color, PNG round trips and that the source metadata/palette remain unchanged.
• Add a release note.

Reproduction:

from PIL import Image, ImageOps

im = Image.new("P", (2, 2))
im.putpalette([255, 0, 0, 0, 255, 0])
im.info["transparency"] = 0
out = ImageOps.expand(im, 1, fill=1)
print(im.convert("RGBA").getpixel((0, 0)))   # (255, 0, 0, 0)
print(out.convert("RGBA").getpixel((1, 1)))  # previously (255, 0, 0, 255)

Validation:

• The final tests against unchanged main: 15 failed, 90 passed. Twelve failures show the output pixels losing transparency; three cover allocation into transparent palette entries.
• After the fix, Tests/test_imageops.py, Tests/test_imagepalette.py, Tests/test_imagecolor.py and Tests/test_imagestat.py: 105 passed, no skips. The existing Tests/test_imagedraw.py::test_new_color also passes; selftest.py: 59 passed.
• Additional regressions cover padding and expansion when a newly allocated border color would otherwise occupy an index reserved by an integer or byte-valued transparency entry.
• Black, Ruff, mypy, Bandit, Sphinx-lint and whitespace/end-of-file/line-ending checks passed for the changed files.

Tests ran on Windows/Python 3.12.11 using the checkout's ImageOps, ImagePalette, ImageColor and ImageStat Python modules with Pillow 12.3.0's prebuilt native extensions and remaining Python modules. Native extensions were not rebuilt; the full test suite and full pre-commit suite were not run.

Prepared with AI assistance.

CI follow-up (2026-09-14): The Windows Python 3.13 and 3.14 x64 checks passed on the maintainer-triggered second attempt of run 34751277259, on the unchanged commit 2d53304. All 53 reported checks passed before the release-note follow-up. The earlier PNG decoding worker crashes have not been root-caused; a successful rerun does not establish that the underlying cause has been fixed. No source or tests were changed to suppress those failures. On the documentation-only follow-up de0892e, Windows Python 3.14 failed again in the same two RGB round-trip tests (2 failed, 4107 passed), while Python 3.13 passed. The failure remains unresolved; this PR remains in draft.

CI comparison (2026-09-14): The passing Windows 3.14 rerun and the subsequent failure both used Python 3.14.7, Windows image 20260907.229.1, zlib-ng 2.3.3, pytest 9.1.1, pytest-cov 7.1.0 and pytest-xdist 3.8.0 with four workers. Their actual checked-out merge commits, f15c554e3d80b79288707cb6dc0e7051f4af45b6 and 8c12e4c14b7121d5f34b17d413c2fd3bf1a73729, have identical top-level Git tree entries except docs, including identical source, tests, build and CI configuration. Both also checked out cached dependencies at 0a1e459d4dbd36ef4f6b411124441f96bdef1110. Static review found the PNG save/seek/open sequence and buffer lifetime consistent with the existing PNG tests. This narrows the comparison but does not identify the crash cause; no tests or dependencies have been changed to suppress it.