Greyscale (Grey/16) with Keyboard Shortcut

[rlivingston]

What I would like to do is have a keyboard shortcut to turn an image into Grey/16. I can assign a keyboard shortcut to Document>>Convert Format / ICC Profile… but that only brings up a dialog window and then I have to select Grey/16 from Colour Format popup. This requires using the mouse fairly precisely and this is what I am trying to avoid.

I use Affinity Photo intermittently and I have a memory of having successfully assigned a keyboard shortcut to this entire action but, if it is not a false memory, I can no longer figure out how to do this.

My use case is that I am processing hundreds of photos. So I am constantly having to fool around with the mouse to convert them to Grey/16 which the workflow requires. Any help with this would be appreciated.

[R C-R]

I don't know of any keyboard shortcut for this, but have you considered using a batch job instead, with a simple 1 step macro that converts the batch job files to Grey/16 & whatever greyscale profile you prefer?

Of course, the downside to this is it creates duplicates of each file, but if you save to a different folder you could delete the originals in one step.

[rlivingston]

One sad fact is that currently Affinity Photo does not allow you to assign a keystroke to a batch. Otherwise I would do what you suggest. Currently my workflow is bringing the image in via the Clipboard because images are being copied from a PDF. Even though they are Greyscale images in the PDF, the copy function on the Mac brings them into Affinity Photo as RGB png files. I do several things in Affinity Photo and the Export them as Greyscale PNG.

Because of the limitation of batches not being keyboard assignable, this is all orchestrated by Keyboard Maestro, including, at this point, the mouse manipulations to get the Grey/16 selected from the popup. This mouse moving step makes the KM script fragile and requires me to be careful not to move the mouse until this stage on the script has passed.

Formerly, I was able to do all of this with a keyboard short-cut which meant I could move the mouse and get ready for the next shot while the Affinity Photo & KM script was running. I do not know whether AP has changed or whether there is some feature that I have forgotten, but I cannot figure out how to do this now.

I could possible Export them all as Color PNG's and then batch them to Greyscale using Graphic Converter or possible AP itself. I have thought about this, but there are reasons why this is not optimal. Thanks for the suggestion.