Photoshop Actions

Why Your Photoshop Presets Keep Failing You (And How to Build Ones That Actually Stick)
Workflows

Why Your Photoshop Presets Keep Failing You (And How to Build Ones That Actually Stick)

I still remember the afternoon a client sent over 500 product shots that needed consistent color grading, background cleanup, and a specific output size for three different retail platforms. Deadline: end of business. I had a preset pack I’d bought the previous month, something marketed as “professional e-commerce ready,” and I honestly thought I was set. Two hours in, I was manually fixing broken adjustments on roughly a third of the images.

Why Your Export Settings Are Quietly Destroying Hours of Editing Work
Workflow & Automation

Why Your Export Settings Are Quietly Destroying Hours of Editing Work

The Problem Nobody Talks About Until It’s Too Late Last spring I delivered 340 product images to an e-commerce client, all exported through a Photoshop action I’d built specifically for their spec sheet. Correct color profile, correct resolution, correct file naming convention. Looked perfect on my end. Their web platform read 60 of them as oversized on upload, and their dev team spent two hours troubleshooting something that turned out to be a metadata issue I hadn’t accounted for.

Why Your Photoshop Export Settings Are Quietly Wrecking Your Client Deliverables
Workflow & Automation

Why Your Photoshop Export Settings Are Quietly Wrecking Your Client Deliverables

There’s a specific kind of dread that hits when a client emails back asking why the jpegs you delivered look different on their end than they do on your monitor. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit, and almost every single case traced back to the same root cause: sloppy export settings baked into a Photoshop action that nobody had audited in months. After 15 years working in commercial photography studios and now running my own post-production consultancy, I’ve built, broken, inherited, and rebuilt more export workflows than I can count.

Why the Spot Healing Brush Fails on Skin - and What to Use Instead (With a Free Action)
Video Tutorials

Why the Spot Healing Brush Fails on Skin - and What to Use Instead (With a Free Action)

Skin retouching at commercial scale has a way of exposing every shortcut you thought you knew. I’ve spent the better part of 15 years watching well-meaning retouchers reach for the spot healing brush on complex skin work, paint over a few marks, and then quietly deliver something that looks like a wax museum exhibit. The texture goes flat, repetition artifacts creep in, and suddenly you’ve created more problems than you started with.

From Good to Perfect: Understanding Automation Levels in Your Creative Workflow
News

From Good to Perfect: Understanding Automation Levels in Your Creative Workflow

From Good to Perfect: Understanding Automation Levels in Your Creative Workflow I’ve been thinking a lot lately about automation levels, not in the autonomous vehicle space, but in something much closer to home: photo editing workflows. Recent conversations about self-driving car classification got me wondering—why do we settle for “pretty automated” when it comes to our creative tools? The answer reveals something fundamental about action design and preset creation that every photographer should understand.

How to Build Photoshop Actions That Actually Work (No More Layer Doesn't Exist Errors)
Video Tutorials

How to Build Photoshop Actions That Actually Work (No More Layer Doesn't Exist Errors)

I built my first Photoshop action at 26, mostly out of desperation. I was three hours into manually applying the same sequence of adjustments to a batch of product shots and something clicked - not in Photoshop, but in my brain. There had to be a better way. Fifteen years and roughly 2,400 logged hours of saved time later, I can tell you that actions are the single most underused feature in Photoshop for working photographers and retouchers.

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

How to Build Custom Photoshop Brushes That Actually Work Inside Actions

Every few months I get a message from someone whose Photoshop action is breaking at the brush step. The dodge-and-burn sequence runs fine, the curves adjustment layers drop in perfectly, but the moment the action tries to paint with a custom brush, something goes wrong. Wrong size, wrong opacity, wrong texture entirely. I know exactly what’s happening because I made the same mistake for two years before I figured out what Photoshop is actually doing when it records a brush stroke.

More Megapixels Without Buying a New Camera: A Photoshop Super Resolution Walkthrough
Video Tutorials

More Megapixels Without Buying a New Camera: A Photoshop Super Resolution Walkthrough

There’s a specific kind of frustration I know well: you’re looking at a shot from a campaign shoot, the composition is perfect, the light cooperated for once, and then you zoom in and see the noise crawling across your subject’s face like static. The file isn’t big enough to print at the size the client wants, and you didn’t have time to bracket or set up a tripod. In commercial work, that moment costs money.

How to Build Photoshop Actions From Scratch (And Actually Trust Them on Real Work)
Video Tutorials

How to Build Photoshop Actions From Scratch (And Actually Trust Them on Real Work)

I built my first Photoshop action at 26 and I haven’t manually repeated a task since. That’s not hyperbole - I track this stuff. But even after years of building complex action sets for commercial clients, I still find myself going back to fundamentals videos when I want to tighten up how I’m structuring a new workflow. In this Aaron Nace (PHLEARN) tutorial, Watch the full tutorial on YouTube, Aaron walks through creating a split color effect as a vehicle for teaching the full action recording and playback cycle.

Photoshop's New AI Actions Panel Is the Biggest Workflow Shift in a Decade - Here's What It Actually Does
Video Tutorials

Photoshop's New AI Actions Panel Is the Biggest Workflow Shift in a Decade - Here's What It Actually Does

I’ve been tracking time saved by Photoshop actions in a spreadsheet since 2014. Over 2,400 hours recovered. That number only stays meaningful if I keep paying attention when something genuinely changes the game - not just tweaks, but structural shifts in how the tool works. The redesigned Actions panel in Photoshop Beta is one of those shifts. In this Aaron Nace (PHLEARN) tutorial, Watch the full tutorial on YouTube, Aaron walks through a brand new Actions interface that combines AI-driven suggestions with a searchable library of thousands of built-in actions.

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

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

The Day I Stopped Doing Things Twice I was 26, working in a commercial studio in Chicago, and someone handed me a folder of 200 product images that all needed the same crop, the same canvas size, and the same sharpening pass before they went to the client. No one told me about actions. I just started doing it manually, one file at a time, and by image 47 I wanted to quit photography entirely.

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

One Friday afternoon a few years back, I had 500 product shots sitting in a folder, a client deadline on Monday morning, and a very specific list of deliverables: web-optimized JPEGs at 1200x1200px, print-ready TIFFs at 300dpi, and white-background composites for an e-commerce catalog. In a previous life, that job would have eaten my entire weekend. Instead, I spent Saturday morning building a system, ran it Saturday afternoon, and watched a progress bar do the work while I made lunch for my kids.