Photoshop Migration; How to handle paths

[Goliath]

The one thing that's keeping us from completely migrating to Affinity Photo are Photoshop paths. We have over a thousand layered tiff files with paths on them. I haven't been able to figure out a way to do a batch convert of these paths into something that Photo 2 could use. Is there anything I'm missing? I understand the paths have to be converted to Shape vectors in order to be imported into Photo. Is there any other solution to this?

 

TIA

[loukash]

Don't know about batch converting, and don't know about the CC versions, but it's possible via Illustrator.
Using PS CS5.5 and AI CS5:

1. in PS: File > Export > Paths To Illustrator
2. in AI: open with settings so that it has the same artboard size as the PS image
3. in AI: give the paths a stroke, whatever, like 0.25 pt, doesn't matter, but they need a width, otherwise the AI PDF stream may apparently ignore them
4. save as AI document with PDF stream
5. open the converted AI document in Photo, do not place it, you want the PDF vectors to be editable
6. drag & drop or place the TIF/PSD image onto the Photo canvas and align it with the already opened curve artboard; note that AI may have saved the doc with non-integer pixels, so make sure ppi and integer pixel values match all the way through for best alignment
7. save as afphoto

That test scenario has worked for me right now.
Actually that's in Affinity 1, I'm not even at my v2 installation right now.

The Adobe part of the conversion can likely be scripted, as both PS & AI are highly scriptable.
The Affinity part can be only partially scripted: Place Image appears to be recordable by macros. On Mac, it's also possible to do a couple things via UI scripting, especially executing all main menu commands is fairly easy.

(Speaking of which: it's not that PS and AI themselves can actually meaningfully interact a lot, haha. I've always found those Adobe inter-app "workflows" a major p.i.t.a.)

[R C-R]

50 minutes ago, loukash said:

The Affinity part can be only partially scripted: Place Image appears to be recordable by macros.

For me on my Mac, Place Image in a macro works fine in V1 but I get an error message in V2 saying it can't be done. I think it is probably a bug.....

[loukash]

I was actually just thinking that placing images can be likely done completely via UI scripting. So for example as long as the converted AI doc and the TIFF image file names are kept identical, you could use AppleScript variables and first open, then place them via the MacOS "Open" dialogs. 

For me as a "hobby scripter" it might likely take quite a few hours to figure it out, but if you have thousands of files to convert, then it still will be a timesaver. In any case, I have done things like this in other apps before.

[lacerto]

On 12/14/2022 at 1:22 AM, loukash said:

(Speaking of which: it's not that PS and AI themselves can actually meaningfully interact a lot, haha. I've always found those Adobe inter-app "workflows" a major p.i.t.a.)

I am not sure if Adobe object models are somehow crippled on macOS and AppleScript, but I think the complete object models are available also for Javascript. On Windows you can use Javascript, VBA or VSTA (VB.NET or C#). Anyway, you have the complete app object models accessible to any app supporting Javascript, VBA or VSTA scripting, to e,g, export to any format supported by object models.

E.g., in VBA, path related PS interface looks like this:

...and the equivalent Illustrator interface like this:

 

You can also run any PS and AI action from within scripts so programming can be facilitated by recording actions in both apps and using them.

There are most probably ready-made scripts on the Internet for these kinds of tasks to get started with.

A non-programmatic approach worth testing -- if Adobe apps are still available for you -- would be importing images with paths to InDesign and then saving as IDML. Affinity Publisher that opens an IDML file can then use ID created TIFF transparencies, which could be saved or copy pasted to be used in Affinity Photo:

EDIT: The image above was mistakenly created using the image alpha channel (which often exists in an image containing a path). Below is a screenshot where InDesign creates a Clipping path using a Photoshop path included in the image, and where an IDML containing such clipping path is subsequently opened in Affinity Publisher (to be subsequently saved in format that can be opened in Affinity Photo, if so liked):

[loukash]

1 hour ago, lacerto said:

I am not sure if Adobe object models are somehow crippled on macOS and AppleScript

Doesn't look "crippled" to me in AppleScript:

1 hour ago, lacerto said:

but I think the complete object models are available also for Javascript.

Yep:

But what I meant by "meaningfully interact" and "Adobe inter-app 'workflows'" is the lack of seamless interoperability between the respective applications and their formats, without workarounds like "export" and scripting.
Unlike Affinity, as we well know, with its "de-facto-single-app" and "de-facto-single-document-format" interoperability workflow, aka StudioLink, aka "File > Edit In…".
Anyway, that's off topic.  

 

[lacerto]

1 hour ago, loukash said:

But what I meant by "meaningfully interact" and "Adobe inter-app 'workflows'" is the lack of seamless interoperability between the respective applications and their formats, without workarounds like "export" and scripting.

Ok, I see [I made a wrong assumption as I have very little experience of Apple scripting, and UI scripting was mentioned]; personally I have found working with scripts and object models quite meaningful and straight forward, but whether this is useful much depends on the workload and how much you need to repeat a specific task. Adobe file formats are indeed different from each other, even if e.g. InDesign and Illustrator share much of their object models. The recent versions of InDesign and Illustrator seem to be able to share content via Clipboard more extensively (they always have, but with limitations). Personally I have not found integration of content from Adobe trio problematic, and I like to keep file sizes small and creation of production files simple and predictable.