| There will be times when you want to apply changes to an image in Adobe Photoshop, and then have the altered image saved to Aperture. To do this, you can use Aperture's Open With External Editor command. If you wanted to automate the entire process of opening an image in Aperture's External Editor and alter an image in Photoshop, then you can use the Open With External Editor Automator action we've included on this book's companion DVD. With this Automator action, you can build workflows that automatically pass images to Adobe Photoshop. Before you can use the action, you need to install it. 1. | Quit Automator.
| 2. | Copy the Start Photoshop Roundtrip.action file from the DVD to your ~/Library/Automator folder. If there is no folder at that location, you'll need to create one.
| 3. | Copy the Photoshop Action Pack from the Lesson 12 folder on the DVD to your Photoshop CS (or Photoshop CS2) folder inside your Applications folder.
| 4. | Reopen Automator while pressing the Option key. This will force Automator to rebuild its library of actions to include the new actions.
| | | 5. | Click the Aperture icon in the Library pane. You should see Start Photoshop Round-Trip in the Action pane.
Using Automator with the Start Photoshop Round-Trip action provides you with an easy way to send an image directly from Aperture into a series of Photoshop operations. For example, say you want to add noise to an image to give it some stylized texture. You can create a workflow that performs this operation and then saves the edited image in the Aperture Library.
Let's create a workflow that adds noise to the currently open image and then saves the image. Aperture will take care of opening the image for us, using the Open With External Editor command.
| 6. | In Automator, click Photoshop in the Library pane.
| 7. | Double-click Use Currently Open Documents to add that action to the beginning of the workflow.
Normally, you begin using Photoshop with an Open command to open a file; however, since we can utilize Aperture's Open With External Editor command, Aperture will handle the opening of our files for Photoshop. This means that when we are scripting this workflow, we simply tell Automator to work with the documents that are already open.
| | | 8. | In the Action pane, double-click on Noise, Mono Gaussian to add it to the end of the workflow. Enter 20 in the Amount field.
 We're now ready to save. The Photoshop actions that you're using don't include any specific Save commands. Instead, you use the Render action to apply the effects you want in Photoshop and to save the file.
| 9. | In the Action pane, double-click Render to add a Render action to the end of the workflow.
| 10. | Click to select the Save checkbox near the top of the Render action.
 Remember, when you use Open With External Editor to pass an image to your image editor, Aperture makes a new version of the image and then tells the other editor to open it. When you save the image from the external editor, it is automatically saved back to the Aperture Library. So, all we need in our Render action is a simple Save command.
| 11. | Save the workflow and call it Round-Trip Noise.
| 12. | Select a few images in Aperture to which you would like to apply some noise.
| 13. | In Automator, click the Run button on your workflow.
Automator will execute the Open With External Editor command in Aperture, and your images will automatically be opened in Photoshop, processed, and saved back to your Aperture Library. Note that the Open in External Editor action will first close any open Photoshop documents.
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You can save your workflow as an application, as you did before, which means you won't have to have Automator open to use it. If there are functions you routinely perform in Photoshop, you can create a suite of tiny little applications. To use them, just select the Aperture images you want to edit, and then open the appropriate applet. |
