Post-Production Workflow

Workflow Optimization

Why Your Photoshop Presets Are Probably Working Against You (And How to Fix That)

There’s a file on my desktop called “DO NOT USE - OLD PRESETS GRAVEYARD.” It contains 47 presets I built between 2009 and 2016 that I eventually stopped trusting, each one a small monument to a lesson I learned the hard way. A sharpening preset that looked perfect on my old 27-inch iMac and then destroyed edge detail on every asset I sent to a client’s retoucher in New York. A batch-resize action that worked flawlessly on JPEGs and silently corrupted embedded ICC profiles in TIFFs.

September 26, 2026

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