Posts

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.

Why Your Photoshop Export Settings Are Quietly Killing Your Delivery Speed
Workflow Optimization

Why Your Photoshop Export Settings Are Quietly Killing Your Delivery Speed

There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes from finishing a retouching job and then spending forty minutes exporting it. The creative work is done. The client is waiting. And you’re sitting there clicking through Save for Web dialogs like it’s 2009, manually typing in filenames, second-guessing your JPEG quality slider every single time. I’ve been doing commercial post-production for fifteen years. I’ve processed product shots for e-commerce catalogues, delivered layered comps to ad agencies, and built batch systems for studios running thousands of files a month.

Does Leica Engineering Transform Action Cameras Into Serious Creative Tools?
News

Does Leica Engineering Transform Action Cameras Into Serious Creative Tools?

When Premium Engineering Meets Action Camera DNA There’s something genuinely fascinating happening at the intersection of heritage camera craftsmanship and modern action camera technology. I’ve been watching this space closely because it directly impacts how we approach color grading and preset development for our workflows. The Insta360 Ace Pro 2 caught my attention precisely because it represents something unusual: an action camera that’s been engineered with what you might call “proper camera” sensibilities.

The Workflow Tools Actually Worth Installing (After 15 Years of Testing Everything)
Workflow & Productivity

The Workflow Tools Actually Worth Installing (After 15 Years of Testing Everything)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that hits around hour three of doing the same task manually. I know it well. Early in my career, I spent an entire day cropping and resizing 200 product images by hand, one file at a time, clicking through the same six steps over and over. By 4pm I was practically catatonic. By 4:30, I was learning how to write my first Photoshop action. I haven’t manually repeated a task like that since.

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.

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.