In this tutorial we are going to utilise some of the powerful features added to the Finder in Mac OSX Tiger, along with a few other additions, in order to enhance our Painter user experience.
If you wish to follow this tutorial, you will have the following capabilities directly from the Finder window;
1. A Variant Smart Tracker which will list all Painter (cached) brush variants selected during your painting sessions within a given time frame (user definable), giving the date and times each variant was last selected. This feature is not to be confused with Painter's Tracker palette.
2. The ability to add working notes in the form of Spotlight Comments to the above. Use the Stickies utility for note taking during the painting session, launched from the Finder.
3. An Automator workflow application to quickly copy and convert all cached variants and associated captured dab jpg files selected in the Finder results window, to a user created folder on the desktop. The resulting folder can then be used as part of a brush category containing variants specific to the current painting project/image for example.
4. The incorporation of Philippe Casgrain's ThumbNailer utility to display thumbnail previews for applicable files which may not currently show them.
5. A Smart Folder based Variant Name Finder. With so many default and custom variants, remembering their exact name and location can be a problem. Just enter the part of the name which you can remember ('round' for example), and a list of possible variants will appear in the Finder results window. Select the variant name you want from the list, and see the associated file path at the bottom of Finder window.
6. The ability to list all your Painter native rif or Photoshop native psd files in the Finder results window in modification date (or alphabetical) order.
7. List all your rif or psd files within defined image resolution ranges. For example, all rif images with a resolution of greater than 99 ppi, but less than 300 ppi, less than 100 ppi or greater than 299 ppi. This will enable users to quickly sort images with resolutions suitable for web or print use for example.
Below is a screen shot of my current Finder arrangement, showing the Variant Smart Tracker in use;
