Photoshop Droplets: The Batch Processing Tool You're Probably Ignoring
Workflow Automation

Photoshop Droplets: The Batch Processing Tool You're Probably Ignoring

A few years back, I took on a product photography contract for a mid-size e-commerce brand that needed 500 SKU images processed, color-corrected, and exported at three different sizes by end of week. It was a Tuesday. I had two days. Most people in my position would have queued up a batch action, walked away, and hoped nothing broke. I did something slightly different: I dragged a folder onto a small icon sitting on my desktop, went and made lunch, came back, and the whole job was done.

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Photoshop Droplets: The Automation Tool You're Probably Ignoring
Workflow Automation

Photoshop Droplets: The Automation Tool You're Probably Ignoring

A few years back I took on a product photography contract for a mid-sized e-commerce brand. Three hundred SKUs, white background, consistent color profile, two export sizes each. Six hundred files total. The client needed them in 48 hours. I’d built the action sequence over the weekend before, tested it on a sample set, and felt good going into Monday morning. What I hadn’t planned for was how many times I’d need to manually trigger that action, folder by folder, because I’d set it up as a standard batch process through Photoshop’s automation menu rather than as a droplet.

Photoshop's Updated Remove Tool Just Changed How I Handle Distracting Backgrounds
Video Tutorials

Photoshop's Updated Remove Tool Just Changed How I Handle Distracting Backgrounds

I process a lot of product and advertising imagery. Hundreds of frames sometimes, all moving through the same pipeline, all needing clean backgrounds and distraction-free subjects. The thing that kills my pace is not the big compositing work. It is the small stuff. A shadow in the wrong place. A stray piece of packaging. A reflection on a floor that nobody caught on set. These are the fixes that used to cost me twenty minutes per image if I was not careful, and they add up fast.

Shooting Action Sequences on a Budget: What Serge Ramelli's Parkour Short Teaches Us About Cinematic Camera Work
Video Tutorials

Shooting Action Sequences on a Budget: What Serge Ramelli's Parkour Short Teaches Us About Cinematic Camera Work

When a Client Asked Me for “Something Cinematic” and I Had to Figure Out What That Actually Meant A few months ago, an ad agency client came to me wanting behind-the-scenes footage for a product launch. They kept using the word “cinematic.” They wanted movement, energy, handheld urgency, but still clean and controlled. I know post-production inside out, but capturing that specific quality in-camera is a different discipline. You can’t action your way out of flat footage in Photoshop.

The 10-Second Field Checklist That Stops You Bringing Home Broken Shots
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The 10-Second Field Checklist That Stops You Bringing Home Broken Shots

I process a lot of images. Fifteen years in commercial studios, and now running post-production for ad agencies and e-commerce clients, I’ve built systems for almost everything. Actions, batch scripts, folder hierarchies that would make most people’s eyes glaze over. But my obsession with efficiency in post kept running into the same embarrassing wall: garbage in, garbage out. No action saves a shot where the horizon is tilted, a branch clips the corner, or the focus landed on the wrong plane entirely.

Four Photoshop Tools That Cut My Portrait Cleanup Time in Half
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Four Photoshop Tools That Cut My Portrait Cleanup Time in Half

I had a shoot come back from a client last month with a note I’ve seen a hundred times: “Can you just clean it up a little?” The background had a half-visible light stand, the framing was too tight on the left side, and the sky looked flat. Any one of those fixes is easy. All three, on a deadline, across a full gallery? That’s where you start feeling the friction.

How Photoshop Actions Actually Work (And Why Most People Build Them Wrong)
Tutorials & Workflows

How Photoshop Actions Actually Work (And Why Most People Build Them Wrong)

The first action I ever recorded was embarrassing. I was 26, working in a commercial studio in Chicago, and I had just spent three hours manually sharpening and exporting 80 product images one by one. Same settings. Same sequence. Eighty times. When a senior retoucher walked past, glanced at my screen, and said “you know you can record that, right?” I felt equal parts relieved and humiliated. I built my first action that afternoon.

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