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Plugin Fatigue Is Real: How I Test Every Photoshop Tool Before It Touches a Client File
Plugin Reviews

Plugin Fatigue Is Real: How I Test Every Photoshop Tool Before It Touches a Client File

Last spring I had a client send over 340 product shots that needed background replacement, color grading, and output to four different size specs. The job had a 48-hour turnaround. My existing stack handled it. But during the process I kept seeing ads for a new AI masking plugin that promised to cut selection time by “up to 70%.” I nearly bought it mid-job, which would have been catastrophic. Instead I wrote it down, finished the work, and tested the plugin properly over the following week.

Affinity's Major Raw Workflow Overhaul: What It Means for Your Preset Strategy
News

Affinity's Major Raw Workflow Overhaul: What It Means for Your Preset Strategy

Affinity’s Major Raw Workflow Overhaul: What It Means for Your Preset Strategy I’ve been watching Affinity’s evolution as a free photo editing platform closely, and their latest update genuinely impresses me. The company just dropped what they’re calling their “biggest photo editing update yet,” and after digging into the details, I think this deserves serious attention—especially if you’re invested in building and sharing presets. What’s Actually Changed The meat of this update centers on Raw development, which honestly needed some love.

Five Photoshop Plugins I Actually Use in Client Work (And Two I Quietly Uninstalled)
Plugin Reviews

Five Photoshop Plugins I Actually Use in Client Work (And Two I Quietly Uninstalled)

Last month I was onboarding a new e-commerce client, a mid-size apparel brand running about 300 SKUs per season. Their outgoing retoucher had left behind a Photoshop setup that looked like a plugin garage sale. Luminar AI, Topaz Denoise, ON1 Photo RAW, three different frequency separation panels, and something called “MagicSkin Pro” that I genuinely cannot find any record of online. Half of these were slowing down their batch exports. One of them was conflicting with their action sets and causing random layer merge failures.

Why Your Photoshop Export Settings Are Quietly Destroying Your Workflow (And How to Fix Them With Actions)
Workflow Optimization

Why Your Photoshop Export Settings Are Quietly Destroying Your Workflow (And How to Fix Them With Actions)

The first time I lost a client file to a bad export, it wasn’t because I made a careless mistake. It was because I trusted a manual process I’d done a hundred times before. A 47-image e-commerce shoot, resized and sharpened by hand, delivered at the wrong color profile because I’d forgotten to convert one batch from Adobe RGB to sRGB. The client’s web team caught it. I didn’t. That was thirteen years ago, and I’ve been building automated export workflows ever since.

Why Your Export Settings Are Quietly Destroying Your Photoshop Workflow
Workflow Optimization

Why Your Export Settings Are Quietly Destroying Your Photoshop Workflow

There’s a specific kind of frustration I’ve felt more than once: you’ve built a tight, efficient Photoshop action, it runs beautifully, and then you watch a junior retoucher spend forty minutes manually exporting the outputs because nobody thought to bake the delivery specs into the workflow. The retouching is automated. The export is chaos. It’s like designing a Formula 1 car and then letting it coast to the finish line in neutral.

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.

Luminar Neo vs. Perfectly Clear vs. Topaz Photo AI: Which Plugin Actually Earns Its Place in a Production Workflow?
Plugin Reviews

Luminar Neo vs. Perfectly Clear vs. Topaz Photo AI: Which Plugin Actually Earns Its Place in a Production Workflow?

The Problem With Plugin Promises Last spring I had a client send over 340 product images from a shoot that went sideways. Inconsistent lighting, mixed color temperatures, a few shots with motion blur that the photographer had missed on set. The deadline was 48 hours. My first instinct was to reach for my batch action stack, but the variation between shots was too wide for a one-size approach. I needed something that could adapt intelligently, image by image, without me sitting in front of a screen making micro-decisions at 2 a.

What Color Lookup Tables Actually Do (And Why They Beat Manual Color Grading Every Time)
Color Grading

What Color Lookup Tables Actually Do (And Why They Beat Manual Color Grading Every Time)

I used to spend 20 minutes per image doing the same color grade. Drag the curve here, nudge the hue-saturation there, tweak the color balance just enough that the client wouldn’t notice the originals were inconsistent. Multiply that by 80 images for a mid-size e-commerce shoot and you’re losing most of a working day to something a computer could handle in seconds. The moment I understood what a color lookup table actually was, that problem went away almost entirely.

Adobe Finally Got It Right: The New Light Adjustment Layer and Why It Changes How I Work
Video Tutorials

Adobe Finally Got It Right: The New Light Adjustment Layer and Why It Changes How I Work

I’ve spent the better part of 15 years building systems to make photo editing faster and more consistent. Most of that time, the Brightness and Contrast adjustment layer sat in my panel like a blunt instrument I tolerated but never loved. It got the job done in the same way that a flathead screwdriver gets the job done on a Phillips screw - technically, but not well. So when Adobe quietly shipped a new adjustment layer called Light, I paid attention immediately.

Understanding Lens Flare: Why Modern Glass Creates Those Dreamy Light Artifacts
News

Understanding Lens Flare: Why Modern Glass Creates Those Dreamy Light Artifacts

Understanding Lens Flare: Why Modern Glass Creates Those Dreamy Light Artifacts I’ve spent countless hours chasing that perfect lens flare in my photographs—sometimes intentionally, sometimes cursing it in the field. But I recently dove deep into the optical physics behind this phenomenon, and it completely changed how I approach flare in my post-processing workflow. The Uncoated Glass Problem Here’s what fascinated me: when light hits an uncoated glass-to-air surface, roughly 4% of that light bounces straight back.

How Unreal Engine 5's Fluid Dynamics Are Reshaping Visual Effects Workflows
News

How Unreal Engine 5's Fluid Dynamics Are Reshaping Visual Effects Workflows

The Convergence of Gaming and Cinematic Storytelling I’ve been watching the gaming industry closely lately, and there’s something genuinely exciting happening at the intersection of game engines and professional visual effects. A new action RPG in development is pushing Unreal Engine 5 to demonstrate what “cinematic” really means in 2024—and the implications for our workflows are worth paying attention to. What caught my eye isn’t just another ambitious game project. It’s how developers are leveraging UE5’s particle and fluid simulation systems to create something that feels less like a traditional video game and more like an interactive film.