Photo: Presets Panel on Adjustment layers? One macro question

[Chris26]

Would have thought this would have been so easy, I made a preset on a B/W adjustment and then immediately expected to find that I could access the preset On that same B/W adjustment dialogue box. Mmmm?  Blow me away if I can find it anywhere...."preset preset where art thou dithering"?

Macros:  Again so easy, but one question, I watched a tutorial and it seemed?  appeared? that as the macro was playing back it would stop at certain points to allow the user to interact with certain dialogue boxes as in photoshop, problem is he never really demonstrated this.  So is this possible?  I could not replicate this except to see certain stages of the macro did indeed have that litte star, which one could use to edit, but not when playback was in force.

Thanksyou.

[walt.farrell]

For your macro question, 

https://affinity.help/photo/English.lproj/pages/Macros_Batch/macros.html

[lepr]

1 hour ago, Chris26 said:

Would have thought this would have been so easy, I made a preset on a B/W adjustment and then immediately expected to find that I could access the preset On that same B/W adjustment dialogue box.

You made the mistake of thinking rationally in Affinityland. Adjustment presets can only be selected in the studio panel named Adjustment.

 

[Chris26]

4 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

For your macro question, 

https://affinity.help/photo/English.lproj/pages/Macros_Batch/macros.html

Hi Walt, I had read this and was confused, very confused, with a frown that made my head 3 inches smaller.  I had experimented with macros (and of course understand photoshops macros and ..... well  Number 1 made sense, excellent,  But Number 2 does not and really needs clarification.  I see that eye icon, I mean to say, what particular settings dialogue, this is so vague,  when I run the macro it does not pause for me to adjust that particular parameter.

1. (Optional) To retrospectively change parameters on a particular operation, click the Settings icon next to the operation. This is useful for fine tuning your macros, or quickly creating variations (e.g., Moderate, Standard, Extreme, etc).
2. (Optional) Within the Settings dialog for a recorded action, enable the Eye icon to expose the parameter to the user (making it interactive) when the macro is run.

 

 

 

4 hours ago, anon2 said:

You made the mistake of thinking rationally in Affinityland. Adjustment presets can only be selected in the studio panel named Adjustment.

 

Seriously?? This feels a bit well, I have no words to describe it,  it feels so comical.  And it would be more sensible to have all the adjusment names in alphabetical order.

 

[walt.farrell]

13 minutes ago, Chris26 said:

.  I see that eye icon, I mean to say, what particular settings dialogue, this is so vague,  when I run the macro it does not pause for me to adjust that particular parameter.

You enable it while editing the macro in the Macros panel. Then it will pause when you run the macro later. 

It's demonstrated in one of the tutorials, if I remember correctly. Possibly one of the legacy ones.

[smadell]

Chris26...

in response to your question about Adjustment Presets, I also have long felt that Adjustments panel should not be the only place where Presets can be found. Personally, I almost never use the Adjustments panel; I invoke adjustment layers from the icon(s) at the bottom of the Layers panel. I posted a suggestion over a year ago, suggesting (as you apparently believe, also) that adjustment presets should be available from their respective adjustment dialogs. To date, though, this has not been implemented.

As far as your question about Macros is concerned, these are similar but not completely analogous to Photoshop actions. PS actions take the form of scripts, and have more programming type choices available. In Photoshop, it is indeed possible to write/create an action that pauses while it waits for User input. This is not (strictly speaking) available in Affinity Photo. What you can do in AP is write a macro that contains, for instance, an adjustment which you then make available to the end User in a dialog. However, that dialog will only present itself at the end of the macro; if you change any of the settings, the macro will completely replay with the new value.

There are some definite down sides to this. First, not all settings can be exposed to the end user. Second, the exposed settings will only be available after the macro has run (but before it is finalized). If the setting must be visualized in the midst of running the macro, this is not going to work.

In the image below, I have written a macro which adds a Brightness and Contrast adjustment with default values of 20% brightness and 10% contrast. After recording the macro, I can click the "asterisk" at the right of the macro step, and then click the "eye" icon. Here, I've clicked the "eye" next to the Brightness setting. I have given the setting a new name (specifically for the dialog box), which says "Adjustt brightness" – note the inadvertent misspelling. When I run the macro, I get a dialog box at the very end which allows me to change the Brightness. It does not allow me to change the contrast, since I chose not to expose that setting to the user.

[Chris26]

13 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

You enable it while editing the macro in the Macros panel. Then it will pause when you run the macro later. 

It's demonstrated in one of the tutorials, if I remember correctly. Possibly one of the legacy ones.

Thankyou Walt, had copletely forgotten about those legacy tutorials so thankyou for the reminder. Have a nice day.

[Chris26]

13 hours ago, smadell said:

in response to your question about Adjustment Presets

Hallo Smadell, thankyou for this expanded explanation about the macro, it certainly helps,  Maybe one day those presets will appear in the intuitive place.  After all I suppose every software ever developed can simply only get better with time - just like wine eh?  I am not a coder, but I might presume to think that there was a reason why Serif did things this way - probably out of necessity for the present moment - I do not know.