Last week I told you how to use Automator to convert a bunch of iPhoto images to black and white. This prompted similar questions from forum visitors Macnutjohn and Matthew Bushey. Wrote Macnutjohn:
I wonder if this could be used to resize images using ColorSync?
To which I would reply, not using ColorSync but rather a different Automator action. It goes like this:
As I explained in the original entry you can choose images in iPhoto and then copy them to a folder on your Desktop by using Automator’s Get Specified iPhoto Items and Copy Finder Items actions. You’ll want to create an album for images you intend to convert—I called mine “To Convert”—and place it in the first action. Then create a folder on your Desktop—mine’s called “Converted Photos”—and make it the destination folder in the second action.
At that point I went on to use the Apply ColorSync Profile to Images action to convert the image to black and white and then a Change Type of Images action to convert the image to the TIFF format. You can forego these actions and move right to changing the image’s size, or you can add another action to this workflow that changes the size of the image.
The action you use for this is Scale Images. Drag it into your workflow and you see that you can configure the pop-up menu to allow you to scale the image to a specific pixel width—640, for example—or choose a particular percentage, such as 75 percent.
Automator also includes a Pad Images action. By default this changes the canvas’ dimensions. You can ask the action to also scale the image before padding it. And there’s also a Crop Images action that you use to crop images to particular dimensions or percentages. Choose the former and you can elect to scale the image before you crop it.