Latest Articles

Beyond Record and Play: How Automation Scripts Took My Photoshop Actions From Good to Unstoppable

Beyond Record and Play: How Automation Scripts Took My Photoshop Actions From Good to Unstoppable

The day I realized I had spent eight hours cropping and resizing the same 200 product images, manually, one at a time, I did not feel like a professional. I felt like a very expensive copy machine. That was about twelve years into my career, and the embarrassment of it pushed me to actually learn Photoshop scripting over a single obsessive weekend. I have not done that kind of repetitive work by hand since.

Why Video Game Adaptations Matter for Visual Effects Artists and Photoshop Professionals

Why Video Game Adaptations Matter for Visual Effects Artists and Photoshop Professionals

The Gaming IP Explosion in Hollywood I’ve been watching an interesting trend unfold in the entertainment industry—major streaming platforms are aggressively investing in video game adaptations. Netflix alone is developing multiple high-profile projects, including a live-action PUBG series helmed by Donald Glover, alongside Assassin’s Creed and Gears of War projects. What does this mean for us working in post-production? Quite a bit, actually. Why This Matters for Photoshop Workflows The surge in gaming adaptations creates unprecedented demand for visual effects artists, colorists, and post-production teams.

Why Your Photoshop Presets Are Probably Working Against You (And How to Fix That)

Why Your Photoshop Presets Are Probably Working Against You (And How to Fix That)

The first Photoshop action I ever built was embarrassingly simple. I was 26, working in a commercial studio in Chicago, and I had just spent 45 minutes manually running the same three-step sharpening sequence on a set of product images. Same settings, same order, same result, every single time. When a senior retoucher walked past and asked why I wasn’t using an action, I didn’t have a good answer. I built my first one that afternoon.

AI Integration Is Coming to Your Creative Workflow—Here's What It Means for Designers

AI Integration Is Coming to Your Creative Workflow—Here's What It Means for Designers

AI Assistants Are Moving Beyond the Chat Window I’ve been watching the evolution of ChatGPT with genuine interest lately, and something significant just happened: OpenAI rolled out plugin support that connects the AI assistant to real productivity applications. While this might seem tangential to photography and design, I think there’s a crucial signal here for anyone serious about optimizing their creative workflows. The new plugins let users leverage ChatGPT to manage their iCloud Mail and Calendar—pulling event details, updating schedules, searching through messages—all through natural language commands.

Why the Sigma FP2 and Leica M12 Matter for Your Post-Processing Workflow

Why the Sigma FP2 and Leica M12 Matter for Your Post-Processing Workflow

The Camera Landscape Has Fundamentally Changed I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what cameras actually matter in 2024. We’re living in a strange era where dedicated photography devices have become almost niche products. Your smartphone probably takes better pictures in low light than a DSLR from five years ago. Drones dominate aerial work. Action cameras handle adventure sports. And yes, I recently discovered that even a humble spotting scope now ships with imaging capabilities.

Beyond Record and Play: How Photoshop Automation Scripts Actually Save Professional Time

Beyond Record and Play: How Photoshop Automation Scripts Actually Save Professional Time

The task was 200 product images. All of them needed the same crop, the same resize, the same output path. I sat down at 9am and started working through them manually because I hadn’t yet learned to build the solution I needed. By 2pm I had finished maybe 60, my wrist hurt, and I had made three cropping errors I’d have to go back and fix. That afternoon, I opened Google and searched “Photoshop batch processing.

Level up your Photoshop workflow

Get weekly tips, actions & presets — free.

Subscribe Free