Photoshop Actions

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.

From One Edit to Thousands: How to Build Photoshop Actions and Droplets That Actually Save Time
Video Tutorials

From One Edit to Thousands: How to Build Photoshop Actions and Droplets That Actually Save Time

I built my first Photoshop action at 26 and I have not manually repeated a task since. That is not an exaggeration - I keep a spreadsheet. Right now it sits at over 2,400 hours saved across fifteen years of studio and consultancy work. So when I came across Vicki Taufer’s segment on actions and droplets in her CreativeLive tutorial on pets and people photography, I watched it twice. Not because the concepts were new to me, but because Vicki explains the mental model behind actions in a way that finally makes the whole system click for photographers who have been avoiding it.

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

The Day I Realized Manual Processing Was Costing Me Real Money Last spring, a mid-size e-commerce client sent me 500 product images that needed the same treatment: background normalization to pure white (255/255/255), a specific shadow style, resizing to 2000x2000px at 72 DPI for web and 3000x3000px at 300 DPI for print, and export to both JPEG at 85 quality and PNG-24. Same thing. Every single file. I’ve been doing this kind of work for fifteen years, and I can tell you exactly what happens when you try to run that volume manually.

Why Your Photoshop Presets Are Probably Undermining Your Own Workflow
Workflow Optimization

Why Your Photoshop Presets Are Probably Undermining Your Own Workflow

The first time I built a Photoshop action, I was 26, working a late shift at a studio in the West Loop, and I had just spent four hours manually resizing and sharpening 80 product images for a catalog client. Same crop. Same output size. Same sharpening radius. Eighty times. By image 60, I wasn’t even seeing the photos anymore, just clicking through the motions like a machine pretending to be a person.

How to Record Photoshop Actions from Scratch (And Finally Stop Forgetting Your Own Techniques)
Video Tutorials

How to Record Photoshop Actions from Scratch (And Finally Stop Forgetting Your Own Techniques)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that hits when you’ve developed a technique you genuinely love, used it a dozen times, and then six weeks later you’re staring at a blank canvas trying to reconstruct it from memory. That used to happen to me constantly in my early studio years. I’d nail a color treatment on a campaign, close the file, and by the next job, half the steps were gone.

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.

How to Record a Photoshop Action and Batch Process an Entire Folder of Images
Video Tutorials

How to Record a Photoshop Action and Batch Process an Entire Folder of Images

I built my first Photoshop Action at 26 and I have not manually repeated a multi-step edit since. That sounds like an exaggeration but I track this stuff obsessively, and the number currently sits at over 2,400 hours saved across my career. So when someone asks me why Actions are worth learning, I don’t give them a philosophical answer. I give them a number. The specific workflow I want to walk you through today comes from a tutorial by Aaron Nace over at PHLEARN.

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

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

Last spring I delivered 847 retouched product images to an e-commerce client in a single business day. Not because I’m particularly fast, or because I have a team. Because every export decision, every file naming convention, every color profile handoff had been decided weeks earlier and baked into a single action sequence. The client asked how I turned the job around so quickly. I told them I’d done the hard work on a Tuesday afternoon six months prior when no one was paying me for it.

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

How I Build Custom Photoshop Brushes That Actually Work Inside Actions

Last year I was building a retouching action for a mid-sized e-commerce client who needed consistent skin softening applied across several thousand product shots. The action worked beautifully in testing. Then I handed it off to a junior editor on their team, opened the results two days later, and found that the softening brush strokes were painting at 40 pixels on their machine instead of the 400 pixels I’d set on mine.

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 built was embarrassing. I was 26, working in a commercial studio, and I’d just spent an afternoon doing the same sequence of steps on 60 product images: flatten, convert to sRGB, sharpen, resize to 2000px on the long edge, save as JPEG at quality 10. Sixty times. By hand. I recorded the action that evening, ran it on the next batch in about four minutes, and felt like I had unlocked something the rest of the industry was hiding from me.

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

How to Build Custom Photoshop Brushes That Actually Work Inside Actions

Last spring I was setting up a new dodging-and-burning action for a cosmetics client, one of those workflows where consistency really matters because the same action runs across 300 product shots in a single batch. The action broke on the third image. Not a layer issue, not a color mode conflict. The brush I had defined for the Healing Brush step had a texture applied that referenced a pattern the client’s machine didn’t have loaded.