Photoshop Actions

Photoshop Droplets: The Automation Tool You're Probably Ignoring
Workflow Automation

Photoshop Droplets: The Automation Tool You're Probably Ignoring

A few years back I took on a product photography contract for a mid-sized e-commerce brand. Three hundred SKUs, white background, consistent color profile, two export sizes each. Six hundred files total. The client needed them in 48 hours. I’d built the action sequence over the weekend before, tested it on a sample set, and felt good going into Monday morning. What I hadn’t planned for was how many times I’d need to manually trigger that action, folder by folder, because I’d set it up as a standard batch process through Photoshop’s automation menu rather than as a droplet.

How Photoshop Actions Actually Work (And Why Most People Build Them Wrong)
Tutorials & Workflows

How Photoshop Actions Actually Work (And Why Most People Build Them Wrong)

The first action I ever recorded was embarrassing. I was 26, working in a commercial studio in Chicago, and I had just spent three hours manually sharpening and exporting 80 product images one by one. Same settings. Same sequence. Eighty times. When a senior retoucher walked past, glanced at my screen, and said “you know you can record that, right?” I felt equal parts relieved and humiliated. I built my first action that afternoon.

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.

How I Built a Batch System That Processed 500 Product Shots in One Afternoon
Workflow Automation

How I Built a Batch System That Processed 500 Product Shots in One Afternoon

There’s a specific kind of misery that comes from doing the same Photoshop crop 200 times in a single day. I know because I lived it. Early in my career, before I understood what Photoshop could actually do for me, I sat in a studio chair for eight hours resizing product images one at a time, clicking File > Export, typing a filename, clicking Save, and doing it again. By image 140, I had started making errors.

Where AI Fits Into Your Creative Workflow (And Where It Doesn't)
News

Where AI Fits Into Your Creative Workflow (And Where It Doesn't)

The Tool Question We Keep Getting Wrong There’s been a lot of hand-wringing lately about artificial intelligence in creative work. I get it—there’s legitimate philosophical territory here about authorship and craft. But I’ve noticed we’re often framing this as a binary choice when the reality is much more nuanced, especially when you’re thinking about your actual day-to-day editing workflow. Let me be direct: I use AI tools. Not because I’m trying to skip the hard parts of being a photographer or designer, but because I’m pragmatic about what saves me time on repetitive tasks.

Blending Photography with Graphics in Photoshop: What Aaron Nace's Workflow Taught Me About Combining Worlds
Video Tutorials

Blending Photography with Graphics in Photoshop: What Aaron Nace's Workflow Taught Me About Combining Worlds

Last month I was putting together a campaign package for a mid-size apparel brand that wanted something between editorial photography and flat graphic design. Their creative brief said “illustrated but real,” which is the kind of direction that sounds poetic in a PDF and turns into a three-hour conversation with your monitor. I know compositing. I know illustration. But seamlessly marrying the two, in a way that doesn’t look like a stock photo got dropped onto a concert poster, is genuinely harder than it sounds.

Blending Photography with Graphics in Photoshop: Six Projects That Sharpen Your Compositing Workflow
Video Tutorials

Blending Photography with Graphics in Photoshop: Six Projects That Sharpen Your Compositing Workflow

There is a category of client work I’ve been getting more frequently over the past two years. Ad agencies want something that sits between a clean product photo and a designed illustration. Not a retouched photograph. Not flat graphic design. Something in between, where the photo feels like it belongs inside a graphic world rather than just being dropped onto a background. I’ve solved this project-by-project, which means I’ve also been inconsistent about it.

How to Build Custom Photoshop Brushes That Actually Work Inside Actions
Brushes & Presets

How to Build Custom Photoshop Brushes That Actually Work Inside Actions

The Problem Nobody Talks About When Sharing Actions I sent a batch action to a client’s in-house retoucher last spring, one I’d been running cleanly for months on product shots. She ran it on her machine and every single dodge step came out wrong. The brush I’d built into the action was pulling from her default settings instead of mine, and the softness, spacing, and flow were completely different. The action itself was fine.

Blending Photos and Graphics in Photoshop: What Aaron Nace's Workflow Taught Me About Working Smarter
Video Tutorials

Blending Photos and Graphics in Photoshop: What Aaron Nace's Workflow Taught Me About Working Smarter

Last month I was three days into a campaign for a Chicago ad agency that wanted product shots with an illustrated, graphic-novel-esque feel. Clean photography married to hand-drawn-style overlays, vintage textures, dramatic shadows that didn’t exist on set. My compositing workflow handled the heavy lifting, but I kept hitting friction at the illustration integration stage. The blending felt mechanical. The lighting lied. I knew the gap between what I was producing and what the client was imagining, and I didn’t love that gap.

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 client send over 500 product shots on a Friday afternoon. New colorway launches for an e-commerce catalog, all needing the same sequence: resize to 2000px on the long edge, convert to sRGB, sharpen with a specific Smart Sharpen value, save as JPEG at quality 9 into a web-ready folder. Same thing, 500 times. I had a weekend. I also had a droplet I’d built in about 40 minutes the month before.

How I Built a Batch Automation System That Processed 500 Product Shots in One Afternoon
Workflow Automation

How I Built a Batch Automation System That Processed 500 Product Shots in One Afternoon

The job came in on a Thursday. Five hundred product images, all needing the same treatment: background removal, shadow drop, color correction to a specific brand profile, resize to 2000x2000 at 72dpi, and export as sRGB JPEGs under 500KB each. The client needed them by Monday morning. A few years ago, that would have meant a miserable weekend. Instead, I had them done by 4pm Friday and spent the rest of the afternoon with my kids.

Mastering Export Workflows: How to Package Your Photoshop Actions Like a Pro
Workflows

Mastering Export Workflows: How to Package Your Photoshop Actions Like a Pro

Mastering Export Workflows: How to Package Your Photoshop Actions Like a Pro I’ve spent more hours than I’d like to admit troubleshooting broken action files and corrupted preset exports. But here’s what I’ve learned: most export problems aren’t mysteries—they’re just preventable mistakes. Let me walk you through the exact workflow I use to export actions and presets that reliably work across different machines. Understanding Photoshop’s Export Limitations Before you export anything, you need to know what Photoshop actually supports.