Workflow & Automation

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 had a Monday morning that I still think about. An e-commerce client needed 500 product images resized, sharpened, and exported to three different specs before end of business. It was the kind of job that makes a less-organized person stare at the ceiling. I had a batch system I’d built the previous weekend, pointed a Droplet at a folder, walked away to get coffee, and came back to 1,500 finished files sitting neatly in color-coded output folders.

The Workflow Tools That Actually Earn Their Keep (And the Ones I Stopped Using)
Workflow & Automation

The Workflow Tools That Actually Earn Their Keep (And the Ones I Stopped Using)

I learned to script because I spent an entire day doing the same crop-and-resize operation 200 times. Not exaggerating. It was a Tuesday in 2009, I was working in a commercial studio, and by hour six I had developed a genuine personal grievance against the rectangular marquee tool. The next morning I sat down and learned enough JavaScript to build an action sequence that handled the whole job in about four minutes.

The Workflow Tools I Actually Use After 15 Years of Commercial Post-Production
Workflow & Automation

The Workflow Tools I Actually Use After 15 Years of Commercial Post-Production

Why I Stopped Trusting My Own Hands for Repetitive Work A few years into running my own post-production consultancy, I had a client send over 500 product shots on a Thursday afternoon. White background, consistent lighting, but every image needed a clipping path, a levels adjustment, an output sharpen, and an export at three different pixel dimensions for web, print, and Amazon listings. Five hundred images. Three exports each. That’s 1,500 output files.

Why Your Photoshop Export Settings Are Quietly Destroying Your Deliverables
Workflow & Automation

Why Your Photoshop Export Settings Are Quietly Destroying Your Deliverables

The file came back from the client at 11:47 on a Tuesday night. Rejected. Not because the retouching was wrong, not because the color was off. Because every JPEG in the batch had been saved at 72 PPI instead of 300, and the print vendor had already started a press run. I was three years into running my own post-production consultancy at that point, and that was the last time I ever let an export step live inside my head instead of inside an action.

Why Your Export Settings Are Quietly Destroying Hours of Editing Work
Workflow & Automation

Why Your Export Settings Are Quietly Destroying Hours of Editing Work

The Problem Nobody Talks About Until It’s Too Late Last spring I delivered 340 product images to an e-commerce client, all exported through a Photoshop action I’d built specifically for their spec sheet. Correct color profile, correct resolution, correct file naming convention. Looked perfect on my end. Their web platform read 60 of them as oversized on upload, and their dev team spent two hours troubleshooting something that turned out to be a metadata issue I hadn’t accounted for.

Why Your Photoshop Export Settings Are Quietly Wrecking Your Client Deliverables
Workflow & Automation

Why Your Photoshop Export Settings Are Quietly Wrecking Your Client Deliverables

There’s a specific kind of dread that hits when a client emails back asking why the jpegs you delivered look different on their end than they do on your monitor. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit, and almost every single case traced back to the same root cause: sloppy export settings baked into a Photoshop action that nobody had audited in months. After 15 years working in commercial photography studios and now running my own post-production consultancy, I’ve built, broken, inherited, and rebuilt more export workflows than I can count.

Beyond Actions: How Photoshop Automation Scripts Actually Work (And Why I Use Both)
Workflow & Automation

Beyond Actions: How Photoshop Automation Scripts Actually Work (And Why I Use Both)

I learned to write scripts the hard way. A client sent over 200 product images that all needed the same crop, the same canvas size, the same file naming convention. I spent the entire first day doing it by hand. Somewhere around image 140, I made a crop error and had to go back. That evening I opened a JavaScript reference guide and didn’t go to bed until I had something that worked.