Workflow & Productivity

The Workflow Tools Actually Worth Installing (And the Ones I Quietly Uninstalled)
Workflow & Productivity

The Workflow Tools Actually Worth Installing (And the Ones I Quietly Uninstalled)

There’s a spreadsheet on my second monitor right now. It has columns for action name, date built, task type, average time saved per use, and total cumulative hours saved. I update it obsessively. The current total sits at just over 2,400 hours. That number is the reason I still evangelize automation to every photographer and retoucher I consult with, even when their eyes glaze over the moment I say the word “scripting.

The Workflow Stack I Actually Use: Honest Notes from 15 Years of Studio Post-Production
Workflow & Productivity

The Workflow Stack I Actually Use: Honest Notes from 15 Years of Studio Post-Production

The first time I spent an entire day cropping and resizing the same image 200 times, I wasn’t frustrated. I was embarrassed. I had been working in commercial photography studios for years at that point, surrounded by people who talked about efficiency constantly, and there I was, manually typing pixel dimensions into the Image Size dialog like it was 1997. That afternoon I went home and learned just enough Photoshop scripting to make sure it never happened again.

The Workflow Stack I Actually Use After 15 Years in Commercial Post-Production
Workflow & Productivity

The Workflow Stack I Actually Use After 15 Years in Commercial Post-Production

There’s a specific kind of misery that comes from doing the same Photoshop task 200 times in a row. I know this because I lived it, about nine years ago, when a client handed me a folder of 200 product images that all needed the same crop, resize, and export sequence. I did the first thirty by hand before something in my brain snapped. I spent the rest of that day learning how to script the whole thing.