Using Your Mac's Built-In Photo Filters

Hidden on your Mac is a set of image filters that you can use on your image files. You can access them in an Automator action, which means you can easily build a simple app that will allow you to apply them to an image quickly. Access filters like blur, comic book, pixelate, neon, and so many more. You can even use this to quickly resize images.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you some hidden photo filters that are built into your Mac and how you can easily use them. 
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So your Mac has image filters built into it called Quartz Composition Filters. But you don't really see these in apps. There is a way to access them using Automator. So you could build a quick little app that allows you to easily get to these filters and apply them to any image file. 
Let's start off here in the Automator app and we're going to create an application. You could do this as a Quick Action but I'm going to use it as an application so we can just drag and drop an image onto it. So first I want to get that image and make a duplicate of it because this filter is going to change the image passed into it. So we don't want to change the original. It's too easy to make mistakes that way. Now you can use Copy Files for this but I like using Duplicate Finder Items better. It's simple and it will just create a copy in the same location as the original. So once we have that let's search for Quartz. There's a bunch of things here. The one we want is Apply Quartz Composition Filter to Image Files. Now if these sound familiar you may be thinking of quartz filters which allow you to do things like compress PDF's. This is a little different. These are composition filters and they do a whole variety of things. I'm going to drag this in here and you see it's going to say, hey this is going to change the original. Do you want to add Copy Finder Items. We don't because we already setup Duplicate there. So I'm going to say Don't Add, we're fine. 
Now here's the Quartz Composition Filter action in Automator. So you can see here it's showing you a sample image and what it will look like if it's applied. You could see there's a whole bunch of different ones. A ton of them. So, for instance, Blur. You could see what that looks like and that there are settings for Blur. You could try Color Controls and there are a whole bunch of settings for color controls. You could try Comic Book. Lots of different ones. Tons of cool things that you could use to modify your images. So you'd think that we need to build a different automator application for each one of these. But we don't actually have to do that because we go to Options here and I look under Options, Show This Action When the Workflow Runs. We'll just check that and it's going to prompt us for all of this stuff every time we run this app. So let's now Save this. I'm just going to Save it to the Desktop for now. You'll probably want to put it somewhere else like your User Application's Folder or something like that. 
Now I'm going to call this Apply Quartz Composition Filter. Once I do that I don't need Automator anymore. I now have this little app here. I've got an image file. All I need to do is drag and drop this onto it. Now the first time you do it it's going to ask for permission to access the location where its at. I'll say okay. You see it comes up here with the choices we can make. Notice it's sticking with the last one that we used when we made this in Automator. So if you think you might be using it with Blur often and the other ones more rarely then you probably want to set it to Blur before you export the application. 
So now you can pick which filter you want. So, for instance, let's pick Blur here. I'll set the amount to .2. I can't quite read what's there but I can actually drag the window here. Ah, Clean Edge. So I can select or unselect that and continue. You can see the duplicate file it created right here. If I Quick Look that you can see it's blurred compared to the original. So let's try some others. I'll drag it into here and let's go to Life Tunnel and you could see it creates that. I can change the X and Y values. Instead of right in the middle (.5) I can move it over. I can have the amount different like that or maybe more and continue. As you can see here this copy looks like that now. There's so many cool things to try out. You're going to see a lot of these if you use an app like PhotoShop or Pixelmator or Affinity. They have a lot of these effects in there but you probably didn't know they were already on your Mac even without buying any of those apps. 
So let me use Comic Book and I could see here Preview Mode. I'll actually be a little bit different depending on which one I choose. Now I can Preview this one. Here's neon. That's pretty. I could click here to select a different color. Pretty interesting things with that. There's even an image resizer. So you can use this to resize images. Let's expand the window a little bit to see the target width and height. So let's create something much smaller, like that and set it to Crop, Stretch, Fit, whatever we want. So let's just do Crop. Add a background color that will fill in the extra spaces. Do Continue. Now we could see here you've got this new image here and it is indeed cropped to that size. Let's try it again and actually have it resize. So what we'll do is 200 by 200 but we'll say that it's going to Fit like that and Continue. Now we can see here we get a smaller version of this. It's a way to quickly resize your photos. Of course this one obviously is going to be a much smaller file, 47K, than this original one. 
So you saw how easy it was to create this in Automator. Once you do you have al thesel filters available to you. Even if you have an app that has filters like this in it, it's so quick and easy to apply one of these with the Automator application that you may want to use this instead if all you want is a quick simple effect.

Comments: 14 Responses to “Using Your Mac's Built-In Photo Filters”

Kay Fisher

3 years ago

But when I run this app it only shows the results of the built in test image not the image I dragged in.
I can't see the results till I finish and open the result file. Is there a way to make it show the real input image?

Gary Rosenzweig

Kay: Yes, that's right. The way it works is you only see the test image. Nothing you can do about that.

Eric Kestler

When I duplicate according to your video, I too saved the result to my Desktop (I didn't Code Sign). When I drop a pic onto it (pic is a newer IMG_xxxx.heic), it kicks it away. I don't get an oppotuntity to try a different filter; my pic gets "thrown" to the side of the screen. Ideas?

Eric: Sorry, no idea where you could have gone wrong. Make sure you set it up to accept files, etc. Maybe start over.

Problem resolved: in your video, you drop an image directly onto the automator app. Stupid_Eric OPENED THE AUTOMATOR APP FIRST, then (tried) dropping the image ONTO THE OPENED APP. That doesn't work.

All is well now. Thank you!

Eric

I tried following the example but got some nonsense message about a code signing error. As this is a local app why should it need to be code signed??? Any suggestions on how to get past this? (Please don't suggest enrolling in the app developer programme).

Solved: I had to follow this piece of advice .... "sudo rm -r /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools" ... apparently some compatibility issue.

Alex

When I followed the procedure described in the video, Automator gave me error messages about too little data. I elegantly solved the problem by adding "Ask for Finder Items" before "Copy Finder Items". Now the app works as it should without reporting errors.

Otherwise thanks Gary for the advice and instructions for a great app. Best regards

Tim A

Nice tutorial and great example of how to use this complex tool.
Would welcome more like this in the future.
Thanks

Thim Fook, Law

Thanks for another great video/tip, Gary.

Rgds.

:-))

I keep getting a "code run" error when I try to save it.. Any clue?

D: Just check to make sure you are setting it up exactly the same way I show.

Paul D.

Hi Gary, I have created the automator app on desktop, as per your video. I drag a photo onto it and the automator opens, as yours does. I adjust or choose a filter, then click continue, but the file created on the desktop is just a white box icon, (with file name xxxxxcopy.jpg) and when clicked open is a black background. I have tried installing iit again, same result, rebooting, restarting, etc. Any ideas?

Paul: I don't know why you would get that. Maybe try different images and different filters and settings.

Comments Closed.

Using Your Mac's Built-In Photo Filters

Comments: 14 Responses to “Using Your Mac's Built-In Photo Filters”

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