Photoshop Actions

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.

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 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.

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.

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.