Nicole Hurst

I agree that the inherent mask of the filter should control coverage of the filter only and not the mask that is being filtered, and so the current (2.0.3) behaviour is a bug.
However, there is a workaround until the bug is fixed: instead of using the inherent mask of the filter, nest another mask in the filter.
 
 

If this has been a bug since 1.5, that's not encouraging that it will be fixed very soon... 😅

This beta is very fast indeed! Also, I don't know if the GPU speed enhancements directly affect the speed of the inpainting brush but it is much faster now. One of the things that I considered the gold standard in Photoshop was their spot healing brush (inpainting) but now I can say that yours is better on many pictures that I have recently tried, in content-aware mode.
One feature request - and I don't know whether to address here or in the non-beta forums, but will start here is that I would really like the last used settings pertaining to inpainting on current layer or current and below to be remembered. Or better yet to have a preferences setting to choose current and below. This is alway a slight annoyance for me when starting to add layers. 

Status: Beta
Purpose: Features, improvements and fixes.
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Photo
Mac App Store: Not submitted
Download ZIP: Download
Auto-update: Available
 
Hello,
We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the first build of Affinity Photo 1.10.0 for macOS.
If this is your first time using a customer beta of an Affinity app, it’s worth noting that the beta will install as a separate app - alongside your store version. They will not interfere with each other at all and you can continue to use the store version for critical work without worry.
This beta is an incremental update to the 1.9.3 version recently released to all customers (although it still installs parallel to the released version, as described above). We recommend that you use this beta in preference to the store version if you are affected by any of the issues listed below.
The changes in the 1.9.4 betas have been rolled into 1.10.
Affinity Photo Team  
 
Changes Since Previous Beta
 
- Added support for emoji 😃👌😻.
- Added the ability to load ACM lens profiles.
- Assorted improvements to astro stacking, including the ability to edit the names of stacked images and the ability to stack images for different filters simultaneously. 
- Fixed issues opening some DNG files.
- Assorted other small fixes.
- Localisation improvements.
- Help improvements.
 
Changes Since 1.9.3

- Serif Labs RAW engine improvements.
- Assorted astro stacking improvements and fixes.
- Fixed Nikon D780 Raw loading when using Serif Labs engine.
- Attempted fix for occasional flickering of rendered document.
- Fixed crash when deleting a procedural texture constant while the cursor is still in the description text field.
- Fixed erratic behaviour with placed images.
- Fixed missing controls when procedural texture dialog is in non-English.
- Fixed crash when macro recording selected layer change in Japanese UI.
- Fixed lockups when loading certain PSD documents with smart objects enabled.
- Added the ability to open FITS files directly, with control over demosaicing.
- Performance and memory usage improvements when using placed images.
- Performance and memory usage improvements when using embedded documents.
- PDF import and export improvements.
- Significant performance improvements in low memory situations.
- Fixed small visual issues when switching back to templates from presets in the new document panel.
- Fixed gradient map adjustment rendering issues.
- Fixed expression input issues with decimal separators other than ".".
- Fixed issue whereby ISO speed was incorrectly reported for some images.
- Help improvements.
- Added support for Xtrans sensor images in astro stacking.
- Added GPU acceleration for blending ranges (in Advanced Blending).
- Further, significant, performance improvements for documents with many layers.
- Significant performance improvements when converting documents between ICC profiles / pixel formats.
- Fixed performance issues with previous build with certain GPUs.
- Fixed spare channel / mask editing.
- Assorted metadata panel tweaks.
- Further panorama stitching performance tweaks.
- Added a new "median" mode to the frequency separation filter.
- The gradient map adjustment now has a GPU implementation.
- Restored the GPU rendering improvements which were dropped towards the end of the 1.9.2 beta. The benchmark version is once again set to 1920.
- Improve performance when manipulating the selected layer immediately after loading a document.
- Significant performance improvements in low-memory situations, reducing use of the swap file.
- Panorama stitching performance improvements.
- Significant performance improvements for documents which contain flattened, opaque layers (usually the result of merge visible).
- Render EXIF exposure time as decimal if above 1.
- Fixed F-number always showing as "f/0" for Leica M-series cameras (and others).
- Fixed issue whereby LUTs would incorrectly report "Identity" as the description.
- Fixed potential crash when quitting with layers still on the clipboard.
- Fixed performance issues with CMYK documents when GPU acceleration is enabled.
- Assorted small fixes.
- Localisation improvements.

Status: Beta
Purpose: Features, Improvements, Fixes
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Photo
Mac App Store: Not submitted
Download ZIP: Download
Auto-update: Pending
 
Hello,
We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the first build of Affinity Photo 1.9.0 for macOS.
If this is your first time using a customer beta of an Affinity app, it’s worth noting that the beta will install as a separate app - alongside your store version. They will not interfere with each other at all and you can continue to use the store version for critical work without worry.
This beta is significantly different from the 1.8.4 version available for purchase - we strongly recommend that you do not use this beta for real work as data could be lost and the files you save are not guaranteed to open in previous / future versions of Affinity Photo.
Furthermore, massive behind the scenes work has been done to enable GPU acceleration for the Windows version of Affinity Photo in 1.9. In theory this should have no consequences for macOS / iOS users - but it’s likely that a couple of things will have become broken along the way. We are giving ourselves a longer beta period with 1.9 in order to find and fix those things.
This also means that the full complement of new features is not available yet in this 1.9 beta - more will be added over the coming weeks.
Thanks again for your continued support!
 
Affinity Photo Team  
 
Changes Since 1.9.0

- Improved “Serif Labs” RAW engine.
- You can now single click a spare channel in the Channels panel to edit it like a layer.
- The Curves adjustment now has numeric field controls for precise positioning.
- Studio presets are now available.
- A benchmarking tool has been added in the help menu. It will only become available when no documents are open.
- Blend modes now work on “alpha only” layers (masks, adjustments, live filters, etc.).
- Added a new “Divide” blend mode.
- Added “Create from centre” for the elliptical marquee tool.
- Allowed snapping to the bounds of the pixel selection.
- Added ability to create brushes from the current pixel selection with one click.
 
To be notified about all future macOS beta updates, please follow this notification thread 
To be notified when this Photo update comes out of beta and is fully released to all Affinity Photo on macOS customers, please follow this thread

I think the OP's issue is not about masking the blur but about blurring the mask in order to feather the transition from masked to unmasked areas.
This can be achieved by clipping the mask layer to the actual image by dragging it on the layer label until the blue horizontal bar appears. Unfortunately it has to be moved out of the image layer before. Once it is  clipped the mask will accept a live filter that won't be hidden and can be modified.

That's true, so this could be considered a "feature" if the color panel switched to greyscale sliders if you have a mask selected, and then jumped back to your default color choice when you are on a different layer. But at this point, it keeps the greyscale sliders even after you switch to another type of layer. 

That's true, so this could be considered a "feature" if the color panel switched to greyscale sliders if you have a mask selected, and then jumped back to your default color choice when you are on a different layer. But at this point, it keeps the greyscale sliders even after you switch to another type of layer. 

Did that ever work?
I just tried it on 1.7.3, 1.7.1 and 1.6.5 and I get the same results you are seeing
Or was it something that worked on MACs but not Windows?
I'm on Windows, cant test on a MAC

Hi both,
Alt-clicking on a mask with a selection active will not create an inverted mask. This is how it has always worked. If you however alt-click without a selection, it will create an inverted mask. 
Thanks,
Gabe. 

@Nicole Hurst
To achieve what I think you want to achieve
make your selection
click the mask button as normal
Go to the Channels panel
right-click on the Mask Alpha layer and select Invert

Hi Nicole Hurst,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
I've reproduced the issue here. Thanks for the video and file. I'm not sure LUT's are supposed to work with Blend ranges at this point but I will check this with the development and will get back to you. Issue logged.

I've attached the demo LUT I made, along with video showing how the blend ranges are not working with the LUT.
lut_test.mp4 Untitled.cube

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, Nicole.
I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I’m afraid the Media Browser has indeed been removed.