Plugin Reviews

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

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