How to Automate Your Workflow in Affinity – Macros & Batch Jobs Explained

Today I'm going to show you how to do something called a macro inside Affinity, which is very similar to Photoshop's actions. So now, if you come from a Photoshop background, you'll know that there is something called a action you can do inside Photoshop, which basically allow for you to take a file, like an image, and do a bunch of changes to it. And then if you have a folder with a hundred images that needs to have the same change applied to them, instead of taking the images in one by one and just sort of like doing it manually and yuck, that just takes way too long. What we can do instead is we can just say, well, I have this folder that has a bunch of images and I just want this one particular set of actions to be applied to all of those images at the same time. basically saving us a lot of manual labor, which is a really good thing. Inside Affinity right now, I can just sort of close down my home menu because I just opened up my program for the first time. And I'm going to take an image that I have. For example, if I have this folder here, I have a folder called images before, which has three images inside of it. I could have used 100. Um, but let's just use three for now. Um, but we're going to take these three images and I want to apply the same action to all three images by only doing it one time. So to do that, I'm going to go and drag in one of my images inside Affinity and just sort of open up to begin with. Now these are RAW files, which means that they are directly from a camera. So I will get sort of this um what do you call this raw development mode when I drag it in for the first time. I'm just going to go and skip this by clicking develop. So once you're inside Affinity with the actual photo, one thing you want to make sure you do is you go inside pixel mode since this is the primary mode for the tools that will actually work with this particular macro feature. Uh if you try to go inside vector mode and you start drawing vectors and you know different uh objects from you know using vector tools, this might not 100% work when it comes to macros. So stick to the tools inside pixel for now because that is essentially Photoshop mode which also has the actions. So what I want to do is I want to go to the top and I want to right click inside the tools bar. Then I want to customize toolbar, go down to panels and then just simply go down to where it says macro. So we have something called macro right here. I'm just going to toggle it on. And as you can see we get macro. Now the first time you open this it may just open up as a full panel on the side over here. Um, this is going to do that because that might be what you're seeing. And inside this macro panel, we can create all sorts of macros to make these actions just very fast. So, inside the macro panel, you can see we have a start recording, we have a stop recording, then you can play it. So, you can actually apply those macros. And then on the right over here, we have reset, add to library, export, and import. So, basically, you can also export and import other macros from other people if you wanted to. So whenever I want to do a recording of some actions I do inside Affinity, I just simply hit the start recording button and then I start doing something to the image. So essentially if I want to change the exposure, I can just click on exposure adjustments over here. Might just change the image in this sort of way. And then you can see, oh, it actually added exposure adjustment set exposure adjustment parameters. So it is starting to record what I'm doing in here. I can also go ahead and say I want to add maybe change the colors. So I can do that. I can go in and I can just sort of change the hue just so we can see exactly what it does. And it has done the changes once we export them afterwards. So I'm just going to make everything sort of look green. Going to close that down. Let's also go ahead and resize the document because that might actually also be something uh we want to do. So I'm just going to resize document. I'm going to make this one a,000 pixels on one side. I'm just going to go and do that. There we go. Resize it. And as you can see, document properties has changed. And from here, we are now done. Like I've done the changes that I want to do. And I want to apply this to a bunch of images. So with that, I'm just going to click stop recording. So the next thing we want to do is we want to actually save this recording. And you can see at the right side we have reset. That is just basically going to reset all the actions because you can from here if I wanted. Oh, I forgot to do some other thing. Uh, I can actually hit recording again and I can just say, "Oh, I also needed to add in brightness and contrast. " So, I'm just going to do that. Oh, okay. Well, now I'm done. So, I'm just going to close this and stop recording again. So, as you can see, you can continue the recording if you want to. But, let's say you want to save this. I'm going to go and say add to library. Once I do that, it is going to say enter a name for this macro. So, I'm just going to call this one test just because it's a test for you guys. And the category is just going to be default when you open this for the first time because we don't actually have any

categories created right now ourselves. So, we're just going to go and say okay. Once you do that, it's going to open up a library tab. And this is where you have all your macros stored. So, in here, you can see that we have a default category. That is the one that it just creates for us to begin with. And we have the test macro here. And I can actually test this by just simply, you know, undoing what I did in here. So if I just go back to the original photo and click on it, you can see it just applies all the different actions we took previously. So we just sort of use this one directly inside the macro panel if we want to. Um, but we can also just go ahead and say, you know what, default category, that's not really something that says a lot to me. So I'm going to go ahead and create a new category myself by clicking the drop down arrow. I'm going to create new category and call this one image adjustments 01 because maybe I'm going to make more, right? Not very descriptive, but let's just do that for now. So, once I create this one, you can see we now get a new category called image adjustments. And I can just sort of drag and drop my test inside this category. And now that is something we have inside that category. And also if you want to delete or edit these different categories, you can just click on the category in the top right corner and say rename, duplicate, delete, move up, whatever. Right? So with all of this, the actual thing that people want to do is to create something called a batch. And essentially a batch is whenever you do this particular macro to many files. So inside my folder here I have two folders. I have one with the before with the original three images and I also have one called after which is right now empty because that is where my adjusted images are going to go once I'm done actually applying these changes. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and close this macro panel down cuz now I have the macro. I don't actually need it. So we could just, you know, remove it and just close it. Uh, but if I use macros quite often, I could also just place it somewhere else. Like, we don't really need to have it anymore, I'm just going to place it over here. And just another note here because some people may ask about this. You don't need to have any images open. You could just to kind of like demonstrate this, I can just close down this image. So now I have nothing open inside this program. Uh, so you don't need to have the images drag and drop inside the program. Like it doesn't have to be that at all. You can just sort of do this from outside the program if that makes sense. So what I can do is I can go inside file. Then I can go down to new image process. where it says batch job. And from in here I want to add the images that I want to have this process run on. So I can say add. Then I can go inside. It actually opened the folder here. That's kind of nice. I'm just going to take these three images. Say open. Now they're open in here. Then I can choose do I want to save them in the original location. So, this same folder that they're inside of or do I want to save it to a new location? So, I'm just going to do that. Going to go back and then I'm going to choose the after folder. Then I can also say what formats do I want to save this as? Does this have to be a Affinity file that we can edit again afterwards or do I want to save this as a PNG image or JPEG? Let's just go ahead and say PNG as well cuz why not? Because we can pick multiple ones if I want to. Then with that, I can also go ahead and say what kind of macro do I want to use on this one. So at the bottom here, I'm going to take image adjustments one because that's what we called it. Once you pick that category, you can then go ahead and actually make sure you click on the actual macro and then apply. And then you can see it is over here on the right side. So once we have this, we can just go ahead and click okay. And then you can see inside my macro uh batch, now it's called batch inside the panel. It is now actually processing the images one by one and you can actually see when it saves it as a PNG, saves as Affinity. Oh, and then it jumps onto the next one and it's doing all of this in the background. So, right now, if I were to go inside my folder here, which is the after folder, you can see that now it has saved two of them and it is right now saving the third one. And it just did that. And there we go. So now if I open up the image just to kind of test this, you can see that I do have the image here and it has done the actual changes because remember I did sort of change the coloring just to make sure we could actually see the changes and this is just kind of neat. So if I open the Affinity file inside Affinity, you can now see that it is going to open the image and the layers that we adjusted are in here as well. Now, there is something else I do need to point out here at the end, which is something people may ask about. What if you have something specific that might be relevant depending on the size of your image, like the scaling or something? Uh, we do inside the macros

panel, if I just drag it back over here. Inside the macro panel, if I go ahead and go inside my library, which is also over here, I'm just going to drag that over there as well. If I go inside my library, you'll also notice that we have something called scaling and alignment. So in here we can say no alignment, no scale or whatever. Uh essentially this one is just going to say if you have something like when you resize documents or when you copy paste images inside your files, where is it going to place those images, how scale those images? So any sort of specific unique things like that you might want to have some additional settings for during your recording when you create the macro, you can change that by having these selected and then apply the macro. So essentially these don't apply as a fixed thing inside the macro itself, but more as a setting I can choose after the macro. So how do you want the default behavior to be when I run these macros afterwards? In most cases, you might not need these because, you know, if you do adjustment layers, it's not really going to do anything. If you resize the document, it may not do anything. But it's just kind of an additional option there that you could choose if you see some behavior that needs to be changed. So, with that said, this is how you do macros inside Affinity or actions as they're called inside Photoshop. So, I hope you enjoyed this video and I'll see you guys next time. — Hey