Time-Saving Tools

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 & Productivity

The Workflow Tools Actually Worth Installing (After 15 Years of Testing Everything)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that hits around hour three of doing the same task manually. I know it well. Early in my career, I spent an entire day cropping and resizing 200 product images by hand, one file at a time, clicking through the same six steps over and over. By 4pm I was practically catatonic. By 4:30, I was learning how to write my first Photoshop action. I haven’t manually repeated a task like that since.

September 20, 2026

Workflow & Productivity

The Workflow Tools Actually Worth Installing (And the Ones I Quietly Uninstalled)

There’s a spreadsheet on my second monitor right now. It has columns for action name, date built, task type, average time saved per use, and total cumulative hours saved. I update it obsessively. The current total sits at just over 2,400 hours. That number is the reason I still evangelize automation to every photographer and retoucher I consult with, even when their eyes glaze over the moment I say the word “scripting.

August 6, 2026