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

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.