I'm using Lightroom Classic 11.0 on Macbook Pro Big Sur (11.6.1).
The new masking feature has introduced bells and whistles while reducing the overall ergonomy and it has irritating bugs for Custom effects:
This problem involves saved custom effects, for example, the "Teeth whitening" custom effect which is provided by Adobe but it applies to any custom effect the user may create, for example "Bozo 123".
Steps
Suppose you want to apply the "teeth whitening" effect using the brush to multiple photos:
For the first photo, I press K to get into brush mode, I then choose "Teeth Whitening" from the custom effects and brush over the teeth and then click on Done. All is well so far however, (a) it would be nice to instead of "Mask 1" it would have "Mask - teeth whitening" as the default mask name if the mask is based on a custom pre-saved effect.
Now move to the second photo and press K again. The bug (b) is that now the Effect reads "teeth whitening (edited)" instead of "teeth whitening". Why is it saying (Edited)? because it has forgotten to copy all the attributes of the Effect - they all get reset to their default and so Lightroom "thinks" it is (edited). You now have to once again search down the list and choose "teeth whitening"!
Please note that this bug exists for non-custom effects as well such as Contrast, i.e., the level of contrast you had used before gets forgotten and it gets reset to zero. However since it is not a custom effect, the word "(Edited)" is not added to Contrast.
Bug (c) is that Lightroom does not remember the previous user chose of "Show Overlay" (key O). It seems to always get turned on for a new mask!
These bugs also apply to other mask types (Linear Gradient, Radial Gradient, etc).
Bug (d) is how the copy/paste of Develop Settings work for these masks. By default they are turned off and not copied. On first view it makes sense not to enable these and forcing the user to explicitly select them (as you may not want them propagated across different photos). However, I use the copy/paste of Develop Setings to copy over to virtual Copies what I have done to the master, for example Copy 1 of a master may be its B&W version: if I adjust teeth whitening on the master, I'd like to propagate it to the copies as well. I can appreciate it being a difficult choice egonomically. Now that you have released LR 11.0 behaving like this, the way to keep users like me happy is to add a new Preferences option "Develop Settings Copy Masks checked?" or something.
All these bugs mean that I end up doubling keystrokes I carry out for a batch of files with respect to version 10 and thus a more cumbersome experience.
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