Photoshop Actions

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.

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.

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

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

The Hidden Cost of “Just Doing It Manually” Last spring I was onboarding a freelancer to help with overflow work from an e-commerce client. She was talented, fast, detail-oriented. And she was doing every single background removal by hand, one at a time, in a 200-image product catalog. Not because she didn’t know better tools existed, but because nobody had ever sat her down and shown her what was actually available.

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.