ANN: Quartz Composition Filters in Revolution for OSX

[Thomas McGrath III]

My Dear Sivakatirswami,

You are most welcome, most welcome. I figured since we weren't going  
to RunRevLive we could still have some fun.....

I too was looking into Core transitions which you know we have already  
in Rev and was trying to make use of some of the built-in features of  
OSX in Applescript. But no luck. It turns out that the Quartz Filters  
are only available at this time through Xcode and Aperature, then I  
found that Automator also has internal access to these filters. But  
they are not scriptable. The applescript dictionaries for a lot of  
these new system wide features is half done. There are references to  
future scriptability for most of them. The difference was that Image  
effects are apple scriptable and Core transitions are already in Rev  
but these Quartz Composition Filters are not!!!

So, I thought why not just build the Automator workflows and turn them  
into apps. Then call those apps from applescript from within Rev. But  
still they won't work directly on an image while it is in Rev but  
rather I am using rev to show the image, then save the image, then run  
the automator filter on the image and lastly reload the image and  
offer the user to save the new image file. It felt like cheating at  
first but then I realized that in RR these images are editable and  
savable and usable and this is not that different than doing all of  
this in an offscreen buffer, not really. Also multiple filters can be  
applied to the same image with very interesting results. Twirl will  
build upon Twirl over and over. I have been playing with this all day,  
it is very addictive.

On to your issues: Two things, The first is you may have to apply the  
filter twice, do it once to initiate the process and then apply it  
again. This is just with the larger files because of the time the  
Automator app takes to run and in Rev I only put in a four minute  
wait. You can change that of course. Secondly, these are meant mostly  
for PNG files and I don't know what the 4.8 M Image format is.

Don't forget that I did this as a demo, so the larger images I set to  
scale in half and you might want to change that.

I would like to put an Undo in and also find a way to further 'script'  
the process.

Unsharp Mask was not among the available filters. But most of them are  
very high end filters.

There are parameters for some of these filters and I am trying to  
figure out how to access them from Rev, but without scriptability this  
is a bit harder to accomplish.

You can definitely accomplish this and a lot more in Automator and no  
it is actually very easy once you know what to look for. You should be  
able to actually open Automator and then open one of the apps I built  
to see how easy it is.

It was almost too easy and yet had not been thought of yet.

I hope you enjoyed this demo stack and if you make any changes send me  
a copy, I would love to see where this could go for us.

Regards,

Tom McGrath III
On May 7, 2008, at 10:08 PM, Sivakatirswami wrote:

> Thank you, Thank you Thank you! and here I just looked into this  
> last week looking for photo processing options from with Rev and  
> missed something really big and came away thinking
>
> "Oh, this Core Image thingy is only for transitions... "
>
> Of course, you have built all the external apps.
>
> only thing:
>
> it worked on Mz Joplin
>
> -- but it did not work on a standard 4.8 megapixel camera image
>
> is unsharp mask an available filter?
>
> Did you build those in Xcode yourself? How hard was that?
>
>
> .I need u