Chicken Nuggets
This week I was working on a commission for a client. In the solution I needed to include a “technical” Style (a Style with certain parameters (meta data, flags) that aren’t necessarily typical of the generic Styles use-case). Then I realised: there was no way to really send Styles in a convenient way. I build a lot of custom install stuff for Capture One, automating the process of setup, shortcuts, dependencies etc, that help simplify and scale installations, but this seemed a little unsuitable for a Style. Then I remembered Style Packs…. Read More
Event Scripting
Events are the coolest way to utlize automation scripting, however the infrastructure for it is complex and pretty impenetrable for the uninitiated, so I wrote this article. The idea of events is that Capture One will initiate scripts automatically and repeatedly when a particular event happens. This means you can develop and extend Capture One’s behaviour to be reactive to certain repetitive conditions. Examples might be: As soon as an image is captured, process it. When I scan this bar code, do a vLookup in Excel and give me all the data… Read More
Get Started With AppleScript – Conditional Processing pt1
The following project/idea I originally produced for the Project Lemonade series for Digital Transitions webinars. The following is a short version of it, if you want to see the full webinar visit and sign up to the DT archive here. Before we get started… For part 1, we will concentrate on writing the script as if we are mirroring the same logic of using Capture One UI and UX concepts. I’m fully aware there are several approaches, model shortcuts, logic and advanced syntax to ultimately achieve the same results. However, this “parity”… Read More
Get Started With AppleScript – Scripting Selections
An intro series to scripting Capture One, with Ben Liddle Splitting hairs: Variants v. Images The thumbnails in Capture One’s browser pane are technically variants. A variant is a unique set of rendering instructions for a given source raw (or TIF, JPG, etc) image file. These instructions are lightweight (few hundred Kb at most), so you can think of these as virtual copies of your image files. Every image file you view in Capture One has at least one variant; unless you objectively create a new variant, there’ll be a 1:1 ratio… Read More
Get Started With AppleScript – Basics
An intro series to scripting Capture One, with Ben Liddle Preamble Years ago, in a warehouse in deep industrial Brooklyn, I was a digital technician on an e-commerce photo shoot struggling to stay awake. It was 3:30 in the afternoon on a crisp winter’s day, and the stylist was diligently stringing up the 80 billionth (by my estimate) crossbody’s strap of the day. The photographer was (probably) retouching his latest editorial job on his laptop in the corner. I was working with Capture One Pro 8 (iirc, maybe it was 7, honestly… Read More
Capture One shortcuts for the terminally curious: part 3 (Final)
We have arrived at the final part of this series: the script! This is a simplified extract of the full installer application I made, as it is simply far too big to break down into a single tutorial. Instead, I have made a fully functional version of the useful part, which does most of the heavy lifting and annoying bit – adding the shortcuts to a set of installed scripts. Prep: Quit C1. Make a folder in ~/Library/Scripts/Capture One/Scripts/ (For my example today: ~/Library/Scripts/Capture One/Scripts/Apply Latitude) Copy your scripts into this folder… Read More
How to make a script applet
Making a script applet is not much harder than actually making a script – from the outside the extension changes to .app, and the app when clicked will “run” rather than open in script editor. Mostly useful. I use Script Debugger for all my AppleScript work. It’s a billion times better than Script Editor. Specifically for applet design, it makes life simpler for adding and removing resources, and you can also add your icons and developer ID easily. You can do this in Apples’ Script Editor but for the uninitiated, it is… Read More
Capture One shortcuts for the terminally curious: part 2.5ish
I was just about to conclude the the shortcuts series and getting to the point, when I realised I may have approached the flow of this project ass-backwards, as there are a lot of other moving parts that make this whole endeavour more relevant if understood first. So, if you have never done this stuff before I should probably ALSO write about these other things. So, to frame this properly and hopefully make this a more, rounded and useful experience, there are two other topics to dig into. Each of these is… Read More
How to install and use scripts with Capture One
There are a few ways to have a script execute and “do its thing” with Capture One. From easiest to hardest: Simple: Copy the script to the CO scripts folder. Simple scripts can be run straight from Capture One’s application script folder. Once installed, these will appear as a menu item in Capture One and is executed by selecting it like any other menu item (this method works well if you want to shortcut your scripts, as per the shortcuts article here). To use this framework: Open the scripts folder from inside… Read More
Capture One shortcuts for the terminally curious: part 2
In part 1 I ended with the idea of using this in to some AppleScript routines but hit a number of design issues with the syntax: Writing everything as a single list is not ideal for scalable or re-useable code. The syntax doesn’t really lend itself to scripting routines The big list was a LOT of escaped text and a pain to edit The main problem – the methodology if run again (say for another project) would replace any existing shortcuts, rather than appending. Less than ideal for building or adding to… Read More