Plugin Reviews

Plugin Reviews

Plugin Fatigue Is Real: How I Test Every Photoshop Tool Before It Touches a Client File

Last spring I had a client send over 340 product shots that needed background replacement, color grading, and output to four different size specs. The job had a 48-hour turnaround. My existing stack handled it. But during the process I kept seeing ads for a new AI masking plugin that promised to cut selection time by “up to 70%.” I nearly bought it mid-job, which would have been catastrophic. Instead I wrote it down, finished the work, and tested the plugin properly over the following week.

September 17, 2026

Plugin Reviews

Five Photoshop Plugins I Actually Use in Client Work (And Two I Quietly Uninstalled)

Last month I was onboarding a new e-commerce client, a mid-size apparel brand running about 300 SKUs per season. Their outgoing retoucher had left behind a Photoshop setup that looked like a plugin garage sale. Luminar AI, Topaz Denoise, ON1 Photo RAW, three different frequency separation panels, and something called “MagicSkin Pro” that I genuinely cannot find any record of online. Half of these were slowing down their batch exports. One of them was conflicting with their action sets and causing random layer merge failures.

September 14, 2026

Plugin Reviews

The Plugin Tax: How to Audit What's Actually Earning Its Place in Your Photoshop Stack

The $600 Lesson Sitting Unused in My Plugins Folder Last year I did an audit of every plugin and extension installed in my Photoshop setup. Not because something broke, but because I noticed my startup times had crept up and I couldn’t account for why. What I found was 14 active plugins. I could justify maybe 8 of them. The rest were things I’d bought during a sale, installed with full enthusiasm, used for a week, and completely forgotten.

August 20, 2026

Workflow & Tools

The Plugin Tax: How to Audit Your Photoshop Stack Before It Audits You

Last spring I inherited a plugin folder from a commercial studio that was shutting down. The lead retoucher had accumulated 34 installed plugins over about six years. Some were licensed, some were trial versions that had quietly stopped working, and at least three were duplicates of each other doing the same luminosity masking job. The folder was a archaeological dig through every trend in retouching from 2018 onward. And the studio had been paying for most of it.

June 10, 2026

Workflow Optimization

How to Spot a Genuinely Useful Photoshop Plugin vs. Marketing Hype

How to Spot a Genuinely Useful Photoshop Plugin vs. Marketing Hype I’ve tested hundreds of Photoshop plugins, and I can tell you that a slick demo video doesn’t mean much. There’s a massive gap between what marketing shows and what actually saves you time at 11 PM when you’re editing your 50th product shot of the day. Let me walk you through how I evaluate plugins, and more importantly, how you can do it yourself without wasting money on tools that look cool but don’t integrate into real work.

February 18, 2026