How to edit multiple images at the same time?

[Juhani]

Is it possible to edit multiple images at the same time in Photomator? Say I apply the Auto Enhance to 300 photos, but want to turn off automatic white balance and turn on sharpening (which the Auto Enhance don't apply) with a particular setting for all of them. Can I do that?

I tried with Copy and Paste Adjustments but those seem to copy and override all of the applied adjustments when pasted. Would be great if we could selectively pick and choose which particular settings we want to copy or paste.

[Martin Chalifoux]

Try to create a new workflow in the app and then apply it.

[Juhani]

There doesn't seem to be any way to turn on or off particular Color Adjustment settings (including White Balance and Sharpening) selectively through Workflows, which is kinda bummer. Under Workflows > Adjust Colors tab you can only apply a LUT, Match Colors and Auto Enhance, that's it. Sharpening should be there under Export as a last thing to be applied, but it's not.

[Juhani]

Thought I found a way when I realized Color Adjustments even have its own menu category with each of the color settings listed as menu items, however whenever I have either one or multiple images selected in the photo browser they are all inactive and dimmed out, and only become available when I Open Edit Tools. But once I do that I cannot select multiple photos any longer, even if I try to do it using the filmstrip.

Seems like a massive oversight and omission, which prevents using Photomator for anything more than a few images at a time. Hope the fix for this is something the team has on their roadmap not too far from now.

[Martin Chalifoux]

A workflow can apply a Preset, and within that preset you can do whatever you want. So by creating a custom Preset plus a workflow I would think you can get what you are looking.

[Juhani]

You mean saving out a LUT preset to disable White Balance and turn on Sharpening? Not sure this would work, but even if it does it feels more like a hack than something I can actually work with on a regular basis. Surely having an option to turn on or off different categories of settings while having multiple images selected is not a huge ask here.

Another couple of annoyances when editing a larger batch of images:

- Selecting multiple images and applying Denoise denoises all the images at 100% without any way to control the strength of Denoise. Would be great if we could specify a base value and then keep tweaking it on each photo separately.

- Saving out one TIFF at a time does not apply any compression to the image, and you end up with these huge files. In contrast selecting multiple images and then saving out TIFF files does apply the compression. Needless to say, it would be great if I could choose myself whether I want to apply compression and which type regardless of how many images I'm saving out at a time.

[Martin Chalifoux]

No a Preset is not a LUT. Look around the Photomator app/help to learn about them. A preset is a set of edits you save to reuse. You will see the preset bar if you reveal it from the View menu (or using Opt-P) when you edit a picture. It takes the place of the filmstrip in Edit mode. A preset saves all the edit sliders. You can then apply that saved present to another photo and have the option to tweak them further afterward.

[Juhani]

Oh wow, I definitely did not know that. Thanks a lot! This changes quite a bit and makes Photomator much more useful for editing larger batch of images.

[Juhani]

After having experimented now with the Presets and Workflows I can report that its capabilities are still very limited and honestly confusing. The main problem is that even if make a clean preset and only turn on Sharpening which I then apply to all images, it wipes out all the other adjustments that I may have had already applied to my images. At the moment there does not seem to be any way to apply adjustments selectively without affecting the rest of the adjustments. You'd think that it would work when you started with a clean sharpening Preset and then applied a ML adjustments etc, but then the sharpening is wiped clean. Anyway I stand by my original request: we need the ability to selectively pick and choose which particular settings we want turn on or off, and copy or paste to multiple images at a time without affecting anything else we may have already done to the images.

[Martin Chalifoux]

I think the expectation is that people will work the other way around. That is you first apply a preset to get a basis. Then you tweak things to your liking.