Graphicxtras

Customize Macros / Recorded Steps In Affinity Photo

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Panels

Affinity Photo Macros and adding parameters, customize the actions for your work. You can record all these steps via the macro panel found via the view menu and studio. You can record many different effects as well as brushes and commands such as adding layers etc. Go to the panel after stopping the recording and click the gear entry / settings button on the right of the entry for each filter or effect (not all will have this)

What is Stored, What is not

Not all parameters are included, so if you go to the add pixel layer, nothing is stored; for the deform command, you can only modify the 'master' but not the position of the handles and the constraint. If you apply a brush stroke, you can modify the color of the brush stroke but none of the other settings such as scatter or scale or spacing etc. If you add a transform: rotation etc are available and stored in the panel. If you add a layer effect, the functionality is fairly limited and most of the effects are not available.

Adding to Custom input Panel

To set this up, click on the little gear entry and then click on the eye icon beside the entries that are available. In the case of the twirl filter, you will see angle and radius and you you can click the eye button for each. Unfortunately, you have to update each in turn. Click the eye beside the 'angle' entry and give it a name such as Angle 1 and then click OK. Repeat with the radius. If you have added multiple filter effects to this recording, you can then click the gear button and repeat this and click the eye for those entries such as 'Angle 2' and 'Radius 2'. Anything you set to ON will now appear in a custom input panel that pops up when you playback.

Playback

Click the playback button and you will see your panel pop up, in the case of the above, it will have angle 1 and Radius 1 and angle 2 and Radius 2 and you can set the values for those or just use the default value. Click apply. As you change the settings, you will see the preview change depending on the effects. Next time you click the button, the same panel will appear. Again, click apply.

Adjustments

Go to the panel and then start recording your action and then go to the layer menu and new adjustment layer and add that such as HSL. You can set the colors for the adjustment and also change the blending mode. Note that the two are on different steps so when you come to update the settings for playback, you will see the two entries and you will have to give names for those (or not if you don't want to use them). Go to the gear / settings and click for the adjustment and you will get a huge range of options to change such as green luminosity, master hue, red hue, blue saturation etc. You decide you are happy to default to the previous settings for all them but for the master hue so click the eye next to that and give it a name. Click the blend mode gear and then click the eye and give that a name. Play it back and you will see a master hue setting along with the blend mode (defaults to the original). This is the same for many of the adjustments as they have a lot of different settings. If you want to save this and all the details for the master hue etc then you will have to click the little add to library button on the main panel and your steps will be saved to the library with a name for future work.