Working With Photo Masks In Designer Pro X9

Please forgive if this has already been discussed - a search of the BBS yields no results.

I had no problem working with and feathering masks in Designer Pro 9. However the upgrade to Pro X9 has made "improvements" that I cannot figure out.

THE SITUATION:
I have a photo in which I want to blur and darken the background while leaving the subject person clear and bright.

I used the mask painter tool to mask out the person, so far so good. I used the picture editing tools to blur and de-bright the unmasked portion. So far, so good.

The result had (of course) too hard an edge between the masked and unmasked portions of the image.

THE PROBLEM:
How can I soften (feather) the edge of the mask? OR how else should I be trying to accomplish this task?

To repeat, I could do this just fine in Pro 9, but in Pro X9 I just can't seem to find out how to do it.

Thanks for any help.

David in Mississippi

I might do this by cloning a copy and roughly drawing a shape around the person.
Then Combine Shapes > Slice and discard the outer part.
I would then feather the edge.

For the bottom-most image, I would blur and debrighten the whole image.

If you then place the sliced image on top of the blurred on, you may get the effect you want.

Acorn