Passing files to SA from other applications

[Tony Bouttell]

Hey all,

Lovely day in Kailua, suns out and there is a nice breeze going on.

I'm trying to figure out if it is possible to use an app say, "Lightroom", for instance, to call SA when I'm ready to perform digital miracles. This is on a MAC btw.

I have Lightroom set up to use SA as an external editor but when I try to pass SA the file, nothing happens. I know SA is being called by Lightroom, because Lightroom does open SA. SA just doesn't open the picture.

If I try to drag the picture icon to the SA program icon, SA opens up the picture but just as small lores version.

I have noticed that when I try to associate PSDs or JPGs to SA, using Finder, SA doesn't show up in the list of installed programs. Is this something to do with the way SA gets installed on a MAC? This may be a clue to the other issues I mentioned.

What I mean by installed app, btw, on MAC, is this: When you select an image file and look at it's properties, there will be an entry that says, "open with:". All the programs you have installed on the MAC are listed when you press the control bar under "open with:". SA is not one of the choices.

When I associate a picture file to any other graphics program, any one of them opens up the picture when I double-click the picture icon. 

TIA

Tony

[John Dalton Synthetik Software]

I don't know the mechanism that Lightroom uses to pass the image. Nor do i know the image file type it would try to pass. If you have any info on that, feel free to pass it on to me.

Studio Artist does support an open apple event, since that is what is called when you drag and drop a file onto the application icon.

Regarding drag and drop, we open whatever they are sending via mime. Since they are apparently sending the small low-res image, that is what we open. If they sent a file url via mime we would open that.

If they tried to pass a raw image file to us, we can't open that file format.

...

Regarding 'open with', you should be able to go to the 'Other...' option, and then select Studio Artist.

[Scott Smith]

John, is it possible to paste copies of images into SA?

[John Dalton Synthetik Software]

You can paste to the clipboard for use in another program. You can not currently go from the clipboard to the source, you'd have to do a drag or an open command. I can look into adding that.

[Scott Smith]

Thanks John, adding the paste command will be a nice addition to SA.

[liveart]

Scott, be very careful.. It is possible to drag an image from your desktop or a folder to the canvas. Doing this will not reset the source, it will however DELETE in a non-undoable fashion any other layers that might be in your work!!

What you can do is use open the open source//recent source and canvas to source (vs open new source and canvas) along with current view as new layer. A combination of these will let you bring in different images to the canvas. You will probably also like to make use of the clone layer and soft blend layer painting tools which will let you bring in just parts of a layer.
Unfortunately for now what one can not do is bring in layers of different sizes.

We could do that back in SA 3, I am very hopeful that John will bring it back for v5.  That capability is really what you want to do the sort of collaging that I see you doing in the work you have posted.

[Scott Smith]

Thanks for the information Michael. I tried your method and it works fine for collage work.

[Tony Bouttell]

I've set the Lightroom preferences to send images as; PSD, 8-bit, 240dpi, using the AdobeRGB(1998) color space.

With regards to drag and drop, SA appears to open the files using whatever it's default files size has been set to, or the values of the file it is currently using. In my test case I opened a file that was 4720x5784. Since the last file opened by SA was 2x20, those were the dimensions SA used when it opened the file.

I found that SA can open files passed by Lightroom. Lightroom has an entry in its preferences where you set file types. It has two choices, PSD and TIFF. so if you send a JPG SA doesn't know what the file is and won't open it.

Also, When Lightroom passes a file to SA, SA opens the file using whatever it's default files size has been set to, or the values of the file it is currently using. The same way it treats drag and drop files.

In all the test cases I looked at, when a files is passed to SA, SA does not open up the "New Canvas" dialog that appears when you open a new file using SA. It would appear this dialog is bypassed. That could explain what I'm seeing.

You may be wondering why I pass files from Lightroom to SA. It's a matter of convenience. Lightroom can display all the files in a hierarchy on one screen. This makes is easier to find them. Since SA uses the OS to find files , I have to search though many directories to find the one I'm looking for. When you have thousands of files and hundreds of directories, any work-flow speedup is useful.

[John Dalton Synthetik Software]

An open apple event acts like an open source menu command if the file type is an image file.

A drag and drop to the source area again acts like an open source command.

Opening a source image doesn't change the canvas size. That's kind of the whole point of Studio Artist, the source image is a separate entity from the working canvas. In that sense it's very different than a program like photoshop, where you open an image and then edit it.

...

You can import an image into the canvas. Then the canvas is changed to reflect the image you imported.

...

I suppose we could offer a preference option that allowed you to set the standard behavior of an open apple event or a drag and drop to run new source and canvas as opposed to open source. I'll think about that.

[Tony Bouttell]

Of course!

I should have realized that just by the fact there is a "New Source and Canvas" selection as well as "New Source" selection.

In my case the canvas size is always the same as the source but I have no idea if other even use the drag and drop functionality or pass files from a third party.

Your solution would be great though. That way no one would be impacted by the change.

Thanks John for looking at this.