Help with Aperture & Automator

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Help with Aperture & Automator

Hi, I'm fairly new to Aperture and I'm hopeful that someone can help me automate a process that will make my life a lot easier.

I regularly save my original photographs into a folder on my desktop, the folder containing sometimes up to a thousand 6MB sized photos. I want to copy the contents of the folder that contains these photographs, resize them to 25% and then add a preset sharpening of Intensity 0.39 & Radius 4.69 in Aperture.

I have set up Automator as follows:

Copy Finder Items ( where I manually select all the images and drag them to the Automator app that I have named Resize & Sharpen )

Scale Images by Percentage (25%)

Import Photos (Aperture)

Apply Image adjustment Preset Sharpen (where my preset is Intensity 0.39 & Radius 4.69)

The process seems to work fine, in that it is copying, scaling & importing to Aperture but does not seem to apply the sharpening preset.

Any help would be really appreciated

Aperture 3, Mac OS X (10.6.8), Also use Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on Feb 18, 2012 12:19 PM

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Answer 1

Feb 18, 2012 3:05 PM in response to Colin_L

The following Automator workflow works for me:

If you post your Automatior workflow it might help to see what's going on.

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Answer 2

Colin_L Author

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Feb 19, 2012 6:02 AM in response to Frank Caggiano

Hi Frank - thanks for the suggestion but I can't upload either a tiff or jpg of my workflow ( see below ) I do have another one where I just resize the images and that works perfectly, every time, it appears to be the process of adding the sharpening where it fails.

I'm also having difficulty putting my image on to this post, even using the icon to do so, I'm finding the image, but the option to "insert image" at the bottom right of the window remains greyed out ( the image is only 143KB - so its not a size issue! )

Am I missing something obvious?

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Answer 3

Feb 19, 2012 6:57 AM in response to Colin_L

Colin_L wrote:

I'm also having difficulty putting my image on to this post, even using the icon to do so, I'm finding the image, but the option to "insert image" at the bottom right of the window remains greyed out ( the image is only 143KB - so its not a size issue! )

It _should_ work. Just tested it here. Apple just made some changes to Discussions (new user agreement, anyway). Have you tried logging out and back in? Is the screen-shot saved as a JPG? (Apologies for being simple. That's all I got.)

Message was edited by: Kirby Krieger -- small addition.

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Answer 4

Colin_L Author

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Feb 19, 2012 2:06 PM in response to Kirby Krieger

Well, here we go, logging on & back on again appears to have done the trick - thanks.

My original workflow looks like this:

and now when I go back to it I'm getting an error message as follows:

and when it opens the sharpen aspect of the workflow changes to:

quick fixes > auto enhance as follows:

I'm obviously doing something wrong but I have no idea what, and as I posted earlier any help to sort this out will be greatluy appreciated.

In anticipation,

Colin

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Answer 5

Feb 20, 2012 3:45 AM in response to Colin_L

Hi Colin -- just a guess: have you defined "sharpen" as an Adjustment Preset? It appears the script needs a defined Preset, and not just a (default) Adjustment Brick.

Again, just a guess.

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Answer 6

Colin_L Author

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Feb 20, 2012 5:31 AM in response to Kirby Krieger

Hi Kirby,

Forgive my ignorance, but can you assist me in how to define "sharpen" as an Adjustment Preset?

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Answer 7

Feb 20, 2012 5:43 AM in response to Colin_L

Sure -- but again, I'm not a script-writer and don't know if that's the problem.

Sharpen an Image using the settings you want to save in the Preset.
Click the "Presets" drop-down at the top of the Adjustments tab of the Inspector.
Click "Save as Preset ... "
The Adjustments Presets dialog opens.
Replace "Untitled Preset" with a name (I like to use something descriptive such as "SharpeningPreset4Automator").
In the right-hand column, remove all but the Adjustment(s) you want to save in the Preset.
Click "OK".

Note that there are two Sharpening Bricks: "Sharpen" remains for backwards compatibility. Aperture recommends using the newer "Edge Sharpen" Adjustment Brick.

Full instructions are in the User Manual.

Message was edited by: Kirby Krieger -- link added.

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Answer 8

Colin_L Author

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Feb 20, 2012 5:53 AM in response to Kirby Krieger

Hi Kirby, Thanks for that - I'm away from my Mac for another 3 hours, but will certainly give that a try and update you.

Cheers

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Answer 9

Colin_L Author

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Feb 21, 2012 5:06 AM in response to Kirby Krieger

Hi Kirby,

I followed your advice and started with a clean sheet, edited a photograph and saved the sharpening as a preset, went to Automator and started a new application off, exactly as before but using the preset, saved the application and then went back in to it and got the same error message as before:

All I can think of is that in Aperture you have to lift the adjustments from one image and then stamp the adjustments to all of the others, is this correct or is there some other way? Is this the same as with Franks workflow where it is for more than one image?

Again, any help is greatly appreciated.

Colin

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