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What's New in Retrobatch 2.0

Retrobatch 2.0 includes a ton of new nodes, new features, a new dark mode, a refined interface, and more.

New Nodes

  • New "Super Resolution" node that uses machine learning to scale up your image 4x its size.
  • New "GPS Location" node that allows you to assign a specific location to your images using the GPS image metadata fields.
  • New "Auto Level" (Straighten) node which will auto-rotate your image a bit if it isn't level.
  • New "Film Grain" node that does what you think it does. Combine it with a Vignette node to make your photos look older and analog!
  • New "Recognized Text" option for the Rules node that you can use to filter out images based on character recognition in the image (Retrobatch Pro only).
  • New "Get Selected Finder Images" node that will use any selected images in the Finder for your processing.
  • New "Clipboard Watcher" node that will look at your clipboard every second and if there's a new image on there, it'll run the workflow using that image as input.
  • New "Periodic" node which will run the chain of nodes it has attached to it after a certain number of configurable seconds.
  • New "Photos Library Import" where you can send images to a specific album in your Photos library.
  • New "Photos Library Modify" which will send an image back to the Photos Library from which it came. If you want to modify a set of images all the same way, this is a good way to go.
  • New "Extract Text" node that will scan your images for text and write it out to a file (Retrobatch Pro only).
  • New "1Bit" node which turns your images into 1bit images.
  • New "Finder Icon Writer" which will use the processed image to write back an icon in the Finder for the original image being processed. If you've ever wanted custom thumbnails for an image, this is the way.
  • New "Quit Retrobatch" node which will quit Retrobatch when a workflow is done. This is useful for droplets when you want to make sure Retrobatch is dead and gone after it runs.
  • New "PDF Quartz Filter" which gives you access to the various PDF filters in ColorSync Utility. You can apply filters to a whole PDF like "Reduce File Size" or Sepia Tone".
  • New "Contrast Stretch" node which will improve the contrast for your image by streching the intensity of the image to cover a larger range.
  • New "Image Equalization" node which will spread out the histogram peaks of your image, making certain areas less intense (or at least more even).
  • New "Download" node which you can plug a URL into and Retrobatch will download it for you.
  • New "Image Diff" node which will compute the difference in colors between every other image.
  • New "Replace Color" node which finds a specific color in your image and replaces it with another.
  • New "Extract Metadata" node that can write out the metadata from an image in either plain text or JSON formats (Pro only).
  • New "Acorn Maker" node which will make a layered Acorn image (similar to the PSD Maker node). You can combine this with the Screenshot and Windows node to make a new Acorn image of all your visible windows, with a layer for each window.

Improvements & New Features

  • Retrobatch can now read SVG files, which is awesome if you want to convert a bunch of them into JPEG or PNG files (MacOS 13+).
  • Retrobatch can now read and write JPEG-XL files. Visit https://jpeg.org/jpegxl/ for more info.
  • WebP and JPEG-XL now have options for lossless encoding.
  • The Write node now has compression options for the TGA image format.
  • The Write node has a new option to embed a thumbnail for JPEG and HEIC images.
  • The Windows & Screenshots node now has an option to exclude the shadow from windows.
  • The Scale option now has a "Bicubic" option for scaling images.
  • You can now set the working color profile for workflows. This is for cases where you want certain filters to work more closely to certain image editors, or if you're using something like the Custom Convolution node and you want to tightly control how pixels are processed.
  • New option to the Clipboard node which allows you to write the native type of an image to the clipboard. If you have a compressed JPEG, it'll write that exact data to the clipboard if that option is selected. Otherwise it'll write PNG and TIFF data by default.
  • The Animated Image node now has a token field for setting the name of the image it produces.
  • There's a new token in the Write node for the album name when pulling images out of Photos.
  • The Drop Shadow node now has an option to keep the original dimensions of an image, for cases where you're processing images with transparent cutouts and you want the shadow to appear inside the image only.
  • The Border node now has an option to have a corner radius.
  • The Scale node now offers the Lanczos scaling algorithm for resizing images.
  • The Delay node can now specify when the delay should happen: Preflight, Every image (the default), or Postflight.
  • Open in App node: Dragging an app icon from the Finder onto the Open in App node will use that app to open the images.
  • Open in App node: Dragging an app icon from the Finder with the option key held down will now add an Open in App node to your workflow.
  • Open in App node will now remember the last app you picked, and use it for newly created nodes.
  • New option in the Write node to encode your JPEG files using the MozJPEG encoder.
  • The Screenshot node now has text field you can use to filter which screenshots are used in a workflow. For instance, if you only want to capture windows from Safari, you would enter "Safari".

Differences between App Store / Sandboxed and Direct versions.

  • The AppleScript, Shell Script, and Get Selected Finder Items nodes are not available in the App Store / Sandboxed version of Retrobatch.
  • Using Retrobatch as a command line tool will run into file reading problems in the App Store / Sandboxed version of Retrobatch.

Changes

  • The "Set Finder Tags" will decide when to write the tags in based on if you have a write node behind it or not. If there is no "Write" node farther down the chain from the "Set Finder Tags" node, then the "Set Finder Tags" node will apply tags to the last read/written place an asset has occupied. So you can have a workflow with two nodes in it: A "Read Folder" → "Set Finder Tags" node, the tags will be written to the original location (this is the original behavior). But if you have a "Read Folder" → "Set Finder Tags" → "Write Images" workflow, then the tags will be added to the images where they were written via the "Write Images" node.
  • The Rules node will now take float values for the "Megapixels" rule.
  • The "Photos Library" node has been deprecated (since it's using APIs Apple wants to get rid of). Instead, use the updated Photos Export node.
  • When using Retrobatch 1.x from the shell, passing a folder as an argument would search through that folder for all image files and synthesize a "Read Files" node and the path hierarchy information would be tossed out. In Retrobatch 2, when a folder is given as an argument Retrobatch will now synthesize a "Read Folder" node for each folder argument it comes across and preserve the folder hierarchy for any images found.

Fixes

  • Fixed a problem where the $SourceFolderPath$ token working correctly with the Indexed PNG and Animated Image nodes.

Other

  • When running Retrobatch from the Terminal with the --workflow option, it will now print out information about what node is currently working on a file.
  • The "PDF Image Extractor" node does a better job at finding images, is faster, and will not re-encode image data if not necessary.
  • The Write node will now open up multiple folders if options like "Write back to original image" or the "Source Folder Path" options are enabled (and it's cases like these where output might be to multiple folders!)
  • Retrobatch will now offer to move itself to the Applications folder if it isn't already there.
  • Did you know you can pull out meta from IPTC tags without a token in the Write node? Just use "$assetMeta.{IPTC}.City$" to grab the city from the IPTC metadata.
  • Retrobatch is a bit smarter at figuring out what type of images it's loading up if MacOS can't figure it out on its own.
  • The Shell Script node will now always append the (last saved) path to the image being worked on when "Every Process" is set for the Run at: option. Previously, Retrobatch would only append the path if no argument options were supplied.
  • The "Quality" slider in the Write node has been changed to "Quality / Comp." as an indicator that it effects compression as well.