Time Savings

The Plugin Tax: How to Audit What's Actually Running in Your Photoshop Workflow
Workflow Optimization

The Plugin Tax: How to Audit What's Actually Running in Your Photoshop Workflow

Last spring I invoiced for a retouching project that should have taken eight hours. It took eleven. Not because the work was harder than expected, but because three separate plugins were fighting each other in my filter stack, and I spent two hours troubleshooting render artifacts that turned out to be a masking conflict between Luminar Neo and a legacy Nik filter I had forgotten was even installed. Two hours. Gone.

Beyond Actions: How Photoshop Automation Scripts Actually Save You Hours (Not Minutes)
Workflow Automation

Beyond Actions: How Photoshop Automation Scripts Actually Save You Hours (Not Minutes)

The task that finally broke me was a crop-and-resize job. Two hundred product images, each one needing a 2000x2000px square crop, a white background fill, and an export at three different sizes for three different platforms. I did the first forty by hand before I stopped, stared at the screen, and did the math. At my current pace, this was going to eat my entire Thursday. That afternoon I learned enough JavaScript to write my first Photoshop automation script.

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.