Yeah definitely. You can do workarounds like drawing circles or using highlighters to create pseudo-masks for use with OpenAI or Google models but it’s really just a visual indication more than anything.

If you want real precision (especially for complex polygonal masks), or if you’re concerned about image degradation over multiple edit rounds, you'll slam against the limitations of those approaches.

Even with SOTA proprietary models, repeatedly editing and re-uploading an image is like making a copy of a copy of a VHS tape: you're gonna see subtle color shifts and quality loss steadily accumulate.

At that point, you either need to put in the manual work in something like Photoshop (bringing elements in as layers and masking them properly) or, as you mentioned, use a model or workflow that properly supports masking.