IPv6

You are very much wrong. 
I understand you would like to see GPU support in the Windows products, so would I, but spamming, tagging, and calling me out on the forum are not the best methods for motivating people.

OpenCL driver support on Windows is inconsistent and probably shouldn't be relied upon.
OpenCV is a computer vision library, not a compute acceleration API, so that isn't really in the same category as the others.
CUDA is proprietary to Nvidia and best avoided as it would not work on GPUs from other companies.
So no, you only really have one GPU compute API on Windows too, or at least only one that can be reasonably expected to be available and usable on the majority of systems.
There are wrapper implementations which implement Vulkan on the Mac over top of Metal - meaning that it doesn't really offer anything that you can't do with Metal, so Vulkan on Windows doesn't really have any technical benefit here compared to Metal on the Mac.  It is at best a draw.

I have now been able to test the latest tablet changes and the good news is that all the fixes in the patch notes work as expected! Drawing feels overall very good now.
One issue that remains still is the non-functioning modifier shortcuts like alt+R click+L click and 100% brush size painting while using L click on your tablet pen using the side buttons. Lastly, and I can't stress this enough, Affinity does not remember brush pressure size from the last known drawn spot when you create straight lines using shift and clicking on the canvas.

Desktop 2020.07.10 - 12.05.11.01.mp4 Fix those two problems and I will overall be very satisfied with the precision of the brushes while drawing. 🥳

Can now confirm current beta as of 9/7/20 pen and tablet WACOM CTH-460 Bamboo pen and touch works perfectly. Win10 2004 and fully utd.
Pen top button drag left-right increases brush size and up down increases hardness.
 
Cheers, Paul.
HTH.

Most GUI toolkits (I haven't really looked at the current Windoze APIs but I'm assuming this is still the case for those) will include flags with both mouse and keyboard events indicating which modifier keys were held down when that event took place.
This means that when a mouse button down event is received (for example), the event will indicate that when the mouse button was pressed down, some mix of the shift, control, and alt keys (for Windows - it would be shift, control, option and command on the Mac) were held down.
They won't say anything about the tab key.
 
Technically it should be possible to track this separately within the application itself, but it's a lot more work to keep track of, the application would need to figure out when to skip processing of whatever else the tab key might be doing, would need to deal with key repeat events, etc...  it's a bit more complicated to "reuse" a typing key than you might expect, particularly when setting up a modifier that might be used when editing text at the same time?
 
You would also need to deal with the OS intercepting combinations such as ALT+TAB, meaning that various combinations of modifiers would not work at all...

Click here to download the latest beta
Status: Customer Beta
Purpose: Fixes
Requirements: A valid product key (for Affinity Store purchases), or an installation of the full retail version from the Microsoft Store

As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. We hope you enjoy the latest build, and as always, if you've got any problems, please don't hesitate to post a new thread in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks once again for your continued feedback. 

If you have a general question about the software, please head over to the Questions Forum, or if you have any suggestions, please head over to the Feature Requests forum.
Fixes
Fixed Huion input failure Fixed flickering brush preview with tablet input Fixed spurious lines being drawn with tablet input Fixed Alt+Drag colour picker getting stuck when using tablet input Fixed crash when failing to load an X3F file (some files will still fail to load, but won't crash) Fixed gradients not changing when Global Colour is modified  Improved support for Canon EOS-1D X Mark III colour data 1.8.4.665 release notes

Just to clarify, without knowing why you work in Lab and what you are trying to accomplish, it is not straightforward to find a work around the suits your workflow.  I'm not sure why adding a Curves layer with a flat L curve is not working for you, but it should, and it is non-destructive.
Some examples of what you can do non-destructively - let's say you want to isolate the b channel and blend it into the original in Overlay mode to pump up the blue-yellow color contrast.  Add a Curves adjustment layer and make the L and the a curves flat, as above.  This will produce the b channel, in color, as you have shown in your previous post.  Set the Curve adjustment layer to Overlay and you're done.  I am not sure what you are trying to do, but there are probably ways of getting it done that involve simple adjustment layer operations that are non-destructive - the methods are just different than PS.
Kirk

It keeps the slider having a useful smaller range and therefore finer increments, without stopping other larger values being typed in.

Please check out XNView. It is just wonderful.

I think he means there is no update notification? I normally let the betas run for a few days before adding the update notification, in order to do a gradual roll out.

Click here to download the latest beta
Status: Customer Beta
Purpose: Fixes
Requirements: A valid product key (for Affinity Store purchases), or an installation of the full retail version from the Microsoft Store

As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. We hope you enjoy the latest build, and as always, if you've got any problems, please don't hesitate to post a new thread in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks once again for your continued feedback. 

If you have a general question about the software, please head over to the Questions Forum, or if you have any suggestions, please head over to the Feature Requests forum.
Fixes
[Installer] Prevent installation into non-empty directory Added EOS 1D-X Mark III to list of known CR3 cameras  Fixed Flood Selection Tool is offset with 'All layers' enabled Minor CR3 tweaks Fixed CR3 from a Canon EOS-R opening with a purple haze Fixed Develop Persona Red Eye Removal Tool crash Improved support for X3F files Removed units from the Crop Tool ratio option Fixed rotating a raw file in Develop Persona darkens it  Fixed adding guides in Develop Persona darkening image Removed "Windows Ink" option, and replaced with high precision WinTab support Fixed AI import incorrectly identifying as EPS when it was actually a PDF with extra data at the front Fixed PDF import for documents with extra data at the front Fixed PDF export for some Asian fonts that support many glyphs Fixed Layers panel dropping of items of right of thumbnail in expanded parents Fixed right-click context menu to disable Merge Down when attempting to merge a Pixel Layer into a shape Fixed PDF import crash due to infinitely searching for fonts Fixed HSL ring displaying incorrectly when returning to the adjustment  Fixed being unable to drag afassets into the app  Changed PDFs to open as restricted if we don't have permission to edit, copy or print them Fixed PDF export accidentally outputting all RGB images at 16-bit 1.8.4.650 release notes

Great Tip!  That does make it much easier and works much like the mixer brush in Photoshop for the low layer. Thank you!
 

1. Median Blur as an option in the Frequency Separation tool
2. Paint Mixer Brush -  Auto CLEAN Brush option
3. Recording Macro using Apply Image Filter - when recording a Macro using Apply Image Filter and using another layer within the same document have the macro record the location of the source layer within the open document, NOT the contents of that layer. 
Example: If I record a macro using Apply Image Filter on one layer and use another layer in the same document as the source. Then I run that macro on a different image, it actually uses the information from the source layer in the document that the Macro was recorded in. That is an undesired effect.... Not looking to create weird unexpected composites....LOL
So making the Macro record the location like "Underlying Layer" or even the layer name within the document would be helpful because then we could just rename source layer before Apply Image Filter when recording the macro so that layer would have the same name in every new file it is ran on. 
3b. A Source Dropdown menu in Apply Image Filter that includes the layers within the image - I am aware that you can drag a layer over and drop it on the dialog box. 

Hey IPv6,
This bug first appeared a couple of years ago and still hasn't been fixed I'm afraid
I've given it a big kick as it hasn't been updated for a while. Thank you for the reminder.

There is a nice option to record brush strokes in macro and replay them on other layers. This works well with Paint Brush and Mix Brush, but not with Smudge brush
Smudge strokes are recorded, but totally ignored on replay. See attached video with example of the bug
Screen_Recording_2020-06-23_at_11_23_18.mov

I've made tons of banners (for web) in Photo and had no issue, what do you mean the app removed layers? Now, I'm mostly using Affinity Publisher but Photo has been fast and intuitive to use. How is this app not intuitive since you are coming from Photoshop? Calling the app garbage is rude, you could've tested it before buying.

It's not "our product", we're just customers, just like you. And I want to have it improved, just like you. Pretty much at the same pace as competitors' apps improve, in a economically healthy speed. But with some common sense one might notice, that those "competitors" aren't ahead either, if you look at the functions available instead of picking one or two from each application and compare only those or comparing affinity apps with an app which cost multiple times more. That's like telling Lada, they should build faster cars, because Ferrari does that!

I have a curve width stroke with gradient applied
Are there any way (automated) to put curve stroke gradient ALONG the curve? From the beginning to end with respect to curvature

It's one of those improvement that I'm hoping will have no noticeable difference to the majority of users. When it works it should be invisible. Basically, if your node is a child object, it will attempt to keep it within the same parent (keeping it inside the group if possible) no matter where you initiate the drag.
 

Status: Beta
Purpose: Features, Improvements, 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 1.8.4 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 1.8.3 version recently released to all customers (though it installs parallel to the release, 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.
Affinity Photo Team  
 
Changes Since 1.8.3
 
- Integrated x3f-tools project, significantly improving support for X3F RAW.
- Added ability to show folders as icons in the layers panel.
- Added option to always show folders as “small” in the layers panel.
- Improved dragging behaviour in the layers panel.
- PDF import performance improvements.
- Document save performance improvements.
- Detect Edges improved on 32bit documents.
- Lens profile popup might report incorrect state.
- RW2 files can cause a crash.
- Text performance improvements.
- Selection brush width is not remember after being changed using modifier keys.
- Placing RAW files now produces Pixel layers, as opposed to Image layers.
- Fixed reading of XP metadata under certain conditions.
- Fix for Nikon D90 RAW loading issues.
- Fixed High Pass filter when using LAB colour.
- Assorted small bug fixes.
- Help improvements.
- Localisation improvements.
 
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 found myself really wishing for this feature while attempting to flat a comic page in AP, I assume this would also have a lot of utility in other illustration work. The functionality already exists in the paint brush and pixel brush tools, so hopefully it's not too much trouble to implement it (also, while you are at it, can you add the Pixel Brush's "ctrl to erase" feature to the paint brush?)
Keep up the good work.

damn.. almost june 2020, still no way to import Warped Mockups PSDs... or warp vectors... I mean, those are kinda basic things for graphic designers..

I've seen some very nice product mock-up template files built in Affinity Photo making use of embedded files that allow for the substitution of new art in the embedded files. See the video below.
The problem is that what is possible to build is limited to flat plane objects (e.g., posters, book covers, iPad screens) because while there is a Perspective Live Filter to distort flat planes, there is no Mesh Warp Live Filter that would allow designers to wrap embedded files around curved or cylindrical shapes like wine bottles.
Is there any chance we might see a Mesh Warp Live Filter within the next few point upgrades? Please?
 

Just to let you know that this is logged and I'm sorry I didn't reply sooner. 

We are getting the divide blend mode in 1.9, is there any chance we will be getting the layer fill mode to complement the special 8 blend modes...hope so 😀