Post-Production 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.

July 30, 2026

Workflow Automation

Beyond Actions: How Automation Scripts Turn Photoshop Into a Production Machine

The day I finally learned to write a Photoshop script, I had just spent seven hours doing the same crop-and-resize operation 200 times. Same canvas size, same anchor point, same export settings. Two hundred times. By hand. I was a working photographer with a decade of studio experience, and I had burned an entire Tuesday doing something a decent script could have finished before my morning coffee cooled down. That was the turning point.

July 23, 2026

Workflow Automation

How I Built a Photoshop Automation Script That Processes 500 Product Shots While I Drink Coffee

There’s a specific kind of misery that comes from doing the same crop 200 times in a row. I know this because I lived it, about twelve years ago, on a catalog shoot that ran long and left me alone in the studio at 11pm with a folder full of raw files and a deadline that didn’t care about my feelings. Every image needed the same treatment: crop to 2:3, resize to 1200px on the long edge, sharpen at 0.

July 12, 2026