Imaginary

Thank you, Simon! Stay healthy!

Still the same in 1.8.0.585 and Beta 1.8.1.611:

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My suggestions for improving the "Refine Selection" tool: 1. When entering the refine dialog, at first the selection does not change at all. No feathering, no matte edges. 2. The user decides where they want to to feather the selection or reanalyse the transition from foreground to background with the feather or the matte brush. 3. The sliders have a global effect on all the edges, whether the brushes were used or not. 4. Foreground and background brushes work just like white and black, without any reanalysis of the edge and spill-over. 5. Colour decontamination is switchable. 6. The preview shows what is, depending on decontamination state.

This is my attempt. I chose output to selection, made a mask and set the layer to difference. Except for some single pixels in the feathered area it is completely black, so no difference, no shadow. Refining was difficult as usual, because the Matte brush made to much of the foreground transparent (that's ok, the image is quite a hard one due to lack of contrast and sharpness) and foreground and background brush spilled over into the opposite areas.

I have never seen such a shadow-like margin so far, so I don't have a sample document. What bothers me most is the unpredictable behaviour of the refine tool when it comes to brushing background or foreground areas. Theres is always some bleeding into the opposite area: The amount of bleeding seems to be dependent on the brush size, but a 2px brush is useless IMO. The second issue relates to the automatic colour decontamination which results in a difference between preview and avctual selection if you do not set output to mask. In Photoshop colour decontamination can be switched off (it is by default). Summing up this means that "refine selection" is not usable in a serious way which really is a pity because Affinity has taken some steps into the right direction...

Bump

Nice idea, I tried to liquify, discarded it, needs a lot of patience...

I have tried to improve the left person, still far from perfect. The right person is kind of impossible to blend in. Lighting and perspective are off too much as @firtsdefence has already pointed out. Try to take another picture of the right person. PHOTO-2020-02-26-23-29-00_edited.afphoto

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.

"Refine selection" is completely useless in Affinity. It produces unpredictable results, it hasn't been improved since 2017. Poor try to imitate Photoshop, poorly implemented. Serif, do you even listen to your customers?

Youtube videos can be set to a lower playback speed by clicking on the gear icon on the right.

Just tested your file here and Photo already crashes when hiding the curves adjustment layer at #4. Edit: Crashes even without modifying the adjustment layer. 1.7.3.481, W10

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