Your comments

I was looking for the reason and found out that the object did not recieve shadows even if recieve shadows was on in the inspector... looked into the shaderforge settings and noticed that the blendmode was set to alpha blended... and of course no shadows, no masking! So this topic can be closed :)

The only question would be why was it set to alpha blended because i certainly did not change it...

Maybe i connected something accidentaly into the alpha input of the main node for a moment. I dont think its a real issue but maybe you want to make sure it changes back to blendmode "off" when nothing is connected to the alpha input anymore. Would make SF a little more idiot proof :D
i will make a copy before trying that :D 
maybe i can check for it later today
hmm, i will take a look if i have overlooked something but i think it should just work since i have the old shader and the new one side by side in the same scene... on the old it works and on the new it does not... i guess it somehow broke while working and unfortunately i didn't notice it immediatly when it happend.
I would also love to have the last 4 modes from photoshop. Hue, Saturation, Color and Luminosity.

I was looking today how i could achieve the "color" blend mode but without luck. Looked at the changelog and was very excited to see the blendmodes are upcoming, unfortunately color is not among them :( 
Compound nodes would also solve the clutter very nicely... Actually these i would prefer if i would need to chose between zoom and compound nodes... still gave this my vote as on the long run it will be an important convinience feature!
I just double checked with photoshop, if i invert the screenshot of the fresnel node it gives exactly the resut of the manual fresnel. So i would say that inverting before the power is the correct way.
I think its only different if the Exponent is other than 1, with the one minus after the fresnel you cant get any result near the one with the manual way, it only gets brighter and brighter, so i would say the one minus should be (or not be) before the Power. It would be the preferred curvature as it gives much more control.
Cool, thanks for looking into it again :D