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Turn Any Lens Flare Stock Image Into a Reusable Photoshop Brush (and Stop Placing the Same Layer 40 Times)
Video Tutorials

Turn Any Lens Flare Stock Image Into a Reusable Photoshop Brush (and Stop Placing the Same Layer 40 Times)

There’s a particular kind of tedium that creeps into composite work when you’re adding the same element over and over. I’ve been there with product shots, I’ve been there with sky replacements, and I’ve definitely been there with light effects. You find a nice lens flare stock image, drag it onto your canvas, set the blending mode to Screen, scale it down, position it, and then realize you need to do that exact sequence fourteen more times for every light source in the frame.

Photoshop's Adjustment Brush Tool (Beta): A Working Pro's First Look
Video Tutorials

Photoshop's Adjustment Brush Tool (Beta): A Working Pro's First Look

New tools in Photoshop are genuinely rare. Adobe spends most of its energy refining what already exists, which is usually the right call. So when something truly new lands in the beta, I pay attention. The Adjustment Brush tool is one of those features that immediately made me think about how many extra steps I take every single time I want to apply a localized adjustment to a subject. Right now, my standard move is: create an adjustment layer, open Select Subject, load the selection as a mask, then tweak.

Camera Settings for Action Photography: What a Horse Racing Shoot Taught Me About Getting Sharp Shots
Video Tutorials

Camera Settings for Action Photography: What a Horse Racing Shoot Taught Me About Getting Sharp Shots

Action photography has a way of exposing every weak link in your workflow, and I say that as someone who spent fifteen years in commercial studios where the subject sat still and waited for me. The first time a client asked me to shoot behind-the-scenes action footage for a campaign, I realized how badly my habits had calcified. I was half a second slow on every critical moment because my camera setup was optimized for product shots, not moving targets.

Adding Window Textures and Light Overlays in Photoshop: A Workflow Worth Stealing
Video Tutorials

Adding Window Textures and Light Overlays in Photoshop: A Workflow Worth Stealing

Client work has a way of exposing the gaps in your toolkit. A few months back I was finishing up a portrait series for an ad agency, and the creative director kept asking for something “moodier, more atmospheric” without being able to articulate exactly what that meant. I knew the bones of the image were solid. What it needed was depth, some suggestion of environment and light without compositing in an entirely new background.

What Happens When You Retouch a Portrait With Only the Brush Tool (Aaron Nace's Challenge, Broken Down)
Video Tutorials

What Happens When You Retouch a Portrait With Only the Brush Tool (Aaron Nace's Challenge, Broken Down)

I’ve spent fifteen years watching junior retouchers freeze up the moment they open a portrait file. They scroll through the tool panel, reach for the Healing Brush, then the Clone Stamp, then some plugin, and before long they’ve got eight tools running and no clear mental model of what they’re actually doing to the image. The irony is that most of the fundamental operations in portrait retouching — blemish removal, dodging, burning, color correction — can be reduced to one core skill: painting with intention.

How to Build a Border-and-Rule Action in Photoshop (And Why Your Workflow Needs One)
Video Tutorials

How to Build a Border-and-Rule Action in Photoshop (And Why Your Workflow Needs One)

Every hour I spend clicking through the same sequence of menus is an hour I’m not billing. That’s not philosophy, that’s arithmetic. I’ve been running post-production for ad agencies and e-commerce brands long enough to know that the difference between a profitable shoot day and a painful one often comes down to how much of your repetitive work you’ve already automated before the files land in your lap. That’s exactly why I keep coming back to tutorials on Photoshop Actions, even after all these years.

Fake the Long-Exposure Cloud Streak in Photoshop (No ND Filter Required)
Video Tutorials

Fake the Long-Exposure Cloud Streak in Photoshop (No ND Filter Required)

There’s a specific kind of cityscape photo I see constantly in commercial work and it always stops me cold: a rooftop perspective, dramatic black-and-white conversion, and clouds that look like they’ve been dragged across the sky by the wind during a long exposure. The effect reads as effortful and cinematic. The reality, at least in post-production, is that you can fake most of it convincingly in Photoshop without ever mounting a camera to a tripod or screwing on an ND filter.

Studio Backup Workflow: How to Archive Photos and Video So You Never Lose a Job
Video Tutorials

Studio Backup Workflow: How to Archive Photos and Video So You Never Lose a Job

I’ll be honest: I didn’t get serious about my archive system until I almost lost an entire e-commerce shoot. One corrupted transfer, one drive that was “probably fine,” and suddenly I’m on the phone with a client explaining why I need to reschedule a product shoot that involved a rented space and a hired stylist. That was the last time I treated file management as an afterthought. Since then, I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit refining how media moves from card to archive, and I track the hours that system saves me the same way I track everything else: in a spreadsheet.

One Light, One Reflector, Every Location: What Rick Smolan's Approach Teaches Us About Portable Setups
Video Tutorials

One Light, One Reflector, Every Location: What Rick Smolan's Approach Teaches Us About Portable Setups

Most of my work lives in post. I’m the person who builds the batch actions, writes the droplets, and figures out why a color profile is blowing up a client’s print run. But the cleanest post-production workflow in the world can’t rescue a badly lit file. After fifteen years watching images come through commercial studios, I can tell you that the photographs that require the least retouching are almost always the ones where someone understood light before they pressed the shutter.

How to Build Photoshop Brushes That Actually Behave Inside Your Actions
Brushes & Tools

How to Build Photoshop Brushes That Actually Behave Inside Your Actions

There’s a specific kind of frustration that hits when you run a batch action overnight, come back in the morning, and find that 200 files stopped processing at step 14 because a brush stroke looked completely wrong at a different canvas resolution. The opacity was off, the size was relative to nothing useful, and the texture that looked great at 3000 pixels wide was basically invisible at 1500. I’ve had that moment more than once, and it taught me something most brush tutorials skip entirely: brushes built for manual painting and brushes built for automated workflows are not the same thing, and they shouldn’t be designed the same way.

The Hidden Amount Slider That Changes How I Use Lightroom's Local Adjustments
Video Tutorials

The Hidden Amount Slider That Changes How I Use Lightroom's Local Adjustments

There’s a category of Lightroom feature I think of as “hiding in plain sight” — things that have been in the software for a while, that plenty of experienced editors have never noticed, and that quietly change the way you work once you find them. The Amount slider collapse in local adjustments is exactly that kind of feature. I stumbled across this tip in a recent tutorial from Matt Kloskowski, and my first reaction was genuine annoyance that I hadn’t known about it sooner.

How to Make Digital Photos Look Like Film Using Lightroom Presets (Mango Street Method)
Video Tutorials

How to Make Digital Photos Look Like Film Using Lightroom Presets (Mango Street Method)

Most of my work is commercial. Ad agencies, e-commerce brands, product shoots where the goal is clean, accurate, and fast. But I still get briefs that ask for “something with a film feel,” and for years my answer was to dig through a folder of half-baked presets that each needed twenty minutes of manual correction before they looked right. That’s not a workflow. That’s wishful thinking. What I actually want is a preset that lands close on the first click and only needs minor exposure or shadow adjustments to finish the job.