It has been established that any geometric changes (rotation, keystoning) should be done before creating any AI masks, as the masks will not follow the new geometry.
I’ve also come to realise that any healing/cloning should ideally also be done before using any masks, as well.
If you suddenly realise you need to clone something out after you’ve created masks, you may end up with weird, ghosted artefacts. For instance, I had created a hue mask to select some deep red flax flowers for increasing vibrance and brightness. Later, I decided a couple of out of focus flowers in the corner needed to go, so I cloned them out. But the increased vibrance and brightness continued to apply where the flowers were.
Sometimes, you can fix the problem by adding a brush submask. I’ve even seen it where as soon as you paint anything, the whole area is suddenly cleaned up, as if it takes this action to re-compute the automatic part of the mask.
Note that I confused myself for a while because I also had a luminance mask on the sky and I thought that was the mask at fault.
I guess, in summary, anything that changes “the shape of your image” should be done first.
Yes, recently I noticed this while experimenting with an image containing some (predefined) AI masks, where the message “Full preview in progess …” was displayed endlessly.
→ Deactivated the masks, applied the repair tool, and then reactivated the masks.
Looks like sound strategies. And if AI masks really were intelligent or handled intelligently, the sequence of changes should not matter. If the sequence matters, processing is either badly designed or AI masks are taken from cache instead of being rethought.
Remember, the sequence of steps is managed by PhotoLab and the sequence of edits used to not matter. If it does now, there is a fair amount of re-engineering to do before PhotoLab regains (user edit) sequence independence.
Other than that, there might be steps that aren’t commutative and then, there should be a a hint in the user manual. Note that I have’n dug into the latter.