Why don't masks rotate with their layers?

[Stokestack]

Hi all.

I masked off some areas of an image, and now I want to rotate the result. But nope: Despite the masks being shown as selected along with their parent, they don't rotate. But if you select a mask by itself, it rotates.

Look at this.

And I might as well head this off: No, flattening is not a solution. I created these masks as vectors on purpose.

Thanks for any insight!

 

[Guest]

My guess is you have 'Lock Children' enabled in the context toolbar of Move Tool. If so, disable it.

[stokerg]

Hi @Stokestack,

As @leprhas stated, you've likely got Lock Children enabled, if you select both the Mask and Parent layer, you should see on the context toolbar along the top, 'Lock Children' untick that and it should solve your issue.  If it doesn't, please provide a screen-recording showing your full screen and workflow. 

[Stokestack]

@stokerg @lepr

Thanks for the quick replies, guys. I never enabled "Lock Children," and in fact would never have noticed that control. Looking at that toolbar, there's nothing anywhere near that button that I would have used and accidentally clicked it, either. When activated it does indeed produce the behavior I reported.

My temporary workaround was to select the layer and "group" it; this did force the mask to rotate with the layer.

I found the problem though! I noticed that after creating the mask and then dragging shapes onto it, the shapes seemed to be masks on their own. They are not shown as children of the mask layer, and activating or deactivating the mask layer has no effect on the masking behavior. So I deleted the mask layer, and sure enough the shapes continued to work as a mask.

But this activates Lock Children without the user being aware of it. That is the problem!

Update: After seeing this behavior, I started over and tried to record it. It didn't happen this time. It's baffling.