Post-Production Workflow

Workflow Automation

Beyond Record and Play: How Automation Scripts Turn Photoshop Actions Into a Real Production System

There’s a specific kind of misery that comes from doing the same Photoshop operation 200 times in a row. I know it intimately. Early in my career, before I understood what scripting could do, I spent an entire day manually cropping and resizing product images for a catalog client. Same crop. Same resize. Same save. Over and over, for eight hours. By the end of it I was making errors I wouldn’t normally make on my worst day, because repetitive manual work degrades your attention whether you like it or not.

November 14, 2026

Workflow Optimization

Beyond Actions: How Photoshop Automation Scripts Actually Work (And Why the Difference Matters)

The day I truly understood the difference between a Photoshop action and an automation script, I was sitting in front of 200 product images that all needed the same crop, the same resize, and the same file naming convention. I did the first one manually. Then the second. By the fourth I was already building the action. By the tenth I realized the action wasn’t going to be enough, because every image had a slightly different canvas size coming out of the camera tether, and the action kept choking on the math.

November 12, 2026

Workflow & Automation

Beyond Record and Play: How Automation Scripts Took My Photoshop Actions From Good to Unstoppable

The day I realized I had spent eight hours cropping and resizing the same 200 product images, manually, one at a time, I did not feel like a professional. I felt like a very expensive copy machine. That was about twelve years into my career, and the embarrassment of it pushed me to actually learn Photoshop scripting over a single obsessive weekend. I have not done that kind of repetitive work by hand since.

October 31, 2026

Workflow & Automation

How I Taught Photoshop to Do My Job (And What Happened When I Let It)

There’s a specific kind of misery that comes from doing the same crop 200 times in a single afternoon. I know this because I lived it, about fifteen years ago, sitting in a commercial studio in Chicago resizing product images one by one because nobody had set up a proper batch system. By image 140-something I started doing the mental math: at roughly 90 seconds per image, I was burning through time that could have been spent on literally anything else.

October 25, 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