Workflow

How to Get Your Lightroom Classic Presets onto Your Phone in Three Steps
Video Tutorials

How to Get Your Lightroom Classic Presets onto Your Phone in Three Steps

I spend a lot of time building systems so I don’t have to think twice on a deadline. Presets are a big part of that. Over the years I’ve developed a library of custom Lightroom adjustments tuned specifically for the kind of work I do – product photography, e-commerce, the occasional ad campaign. They live in Lightroom Classic, which is where I do all my serious editing. But more and more, clients want quick turnaround on selects reviewed from a phone, or they want me to make a light pass on tethered shots while I’m still on location.

From Rope Photo to Pattern Brush: A Cross-App Workflow That Actually Holds Up
Video Tutorials

From Rope Photo to Pattern Brush: A Cross-App Workflow That Actually Holds Up

Most of my work lives inside repeatable systems. Actions, batch exports, preset pipelines built to survive a Monday morning with 300 product shots due by noon. But every so often a client brief lands that needs something handcrafted-looking, something with texture and physicality that a gradient overlay just cannot fake. That’s when brush work and pattern techniques become genuinely useful, not decorative exercises. This particular workflow came across my radar through Watch the full tutorial on YouTube from Kelvin Designs, where Kelvin walks through creating a seamless rope pattern in Photoshop and then applying it along a vector path in Illustrator.

LUTs in Lightroom Are More Powerful Than You Think (Especially With a Profile Intensity Slider)
Video Tutorials

LUTs in Lightroom Are More Powerful Than You Think (Especially With a Profile Intensity Slider)

If you do any volume of editing, you have probably felt the friction of applying a LUT-based look to still photos. LUTs live comfortably in Premiere and DaVinci, but getting them to behave inside Lightroom has historically required workarounds that feel more like duct tape than a real system. That problem gets worse when you work with clients who want their product photography and video content to feel like they came from the same shoot.

Building a Timeless Lightroom Preset from Scratch: A Step-by-Step Breakdown
Video Tutorials

Building a Timeless Lightroom Preset from Scratch: A Step-by-Step Breakdown

There’s a specific kind of frustration I know well: you’ve shot a great set of portraits, the lighting is solid, the composition is clean, and then you spend 45 minutes in Lightroom pushing the same six sliders around until something feels almost right. Multiply that by a client gallery of 200 images and you’ve just lost half a day to guesswork. What I’ve always wanted is a preset built on principles, not trends – something I can actually understand, modify, and trust across different lighting conditions and subject types.

How to Create Custom Adjustment Layer Presets in Photoshop (February 2024 Update)
Video Tutorials

How to Create Custom Adjustment Layer Presets in Photoshop (February 2024 Update)

If you’ve been building Photoshop workflows for any length of time, you already know that adjustment layers are the backbone of non-destructive editing. Brightness, contrast, curves, hue and saturation - these are the tools that do the heavy lifting on nearly every image I process, whether it’s a single hero shot for an ad campaign or a batch of 300 e-commerce frames. The problem, until very recently, was that the preset system inside the Adjustments panel was a one-way street.

Four Photoshop Tools That Cut My Portrait Cleanup Time in Half
Video Tutorials

Four Photoshop Tools That Cut My Portrait Cleanup Time in Half

There’s a category of retouching work that never makes it into anyone’s portfolio but eats up a surprising chunk of billable hours. Background clutter. Stray wires. A parking cone that somehow wandered into the corner of a lifestyle shoot. For most of my career I handled these the same way everyone else did: Clone Stamp, Patch tool, Content-Aware Fill, rinse and repeat. It worked, but on a heavy e-commerce day it could chew through an hour before I’d even started the actual color work.

Blending Photos and Graphics in Photoshop: What Aaron Nace's Workflow Taught Me About Working Smarter
Video Tutorials

Blending Photos and Graphics in Photoshop: What Aaron Nace's Workflow Taught Me About Working Smarter

Client work has a way of pushing you into techniques you’d never have explored on your own. Ad agencies started asking me for portraits with a graphic, illustrated feel about two years ago, and I spent an embarrassing amount of time cobbling together workflows from scattered forum posts. So when PHLEARN released their Graphic Portrait Pro tutorial, hosted by Aaron Nace, I watched the whole thing twice before breakfast. Not because the concepts were brand new to me, but because seeing six complete workflows in one place, with all the source files included, is the kind of resource that would have saved me weeks of trial and error.

Photoshop's Updated Remove Tool Is the Closest Thing to Magic I've Added to My Workflow
Video Tutorials

Photoshop's Updated Remove Tool Is the Closest Thing to Magic I've Added to My Workflow

I track time obsessively. Not in a vague, “I should be more productive” way, but in a literal spreadsheet-with-color-coded-columns way. So when a tool promises to save hours on a task I repeat constantly across client work, I pay attention immediately. The Remove Tool in Photoshop has always been solid, but the latest update pushes it into genuinely different territory. Instead of painting over distractions manually one by one, Photoshop can now scan your entire image, identify what doesn’t belong, and remove it all in a single operation.

How to Record Complex Multi-Step Actions
Actions

How to Record Complex Multi-Step Actions

Recording a simple Photoshop action is straightforward — hit record, do your steps, hit stop. But complex multi-step actions that work reliably across different images require planning and a few techniques most people skip. Plan Before You Record The biggest mistake is hitting the record button and figuring it out as you go. Complex actions need a written plan. Open a text file and list every step in order. Note which steps need user input (like selecting an area) and which should run automatically.

Building Custom Photoshop Presets That Actually Save You Time
Workflow Optimization

Building Custom Photoshop Presets That Actually Save You Time

Building Custom Photoshop Presets That Actually Save You Time I’ve watched a lot of creators accumulate hundreds of presets they never use. Their Curves panel becomes a graveyard of “maybe someday” adjustments. Here’s the thing: custom presets only work when they solve actual problems in your real workflow. Let me show you how I build presets that stick around and actually get used. Know What Problem You’re Solving Before you save anything, ask yourself: “Am I doing this adjustment sequence more than twice a month?

Building Cinematic Worlds: A Matte Painting Workflow That Actually Works
News

Building Cinematic Worlds: A Matte Painting Workflow That Actually Works

I’ve been diving into matte painting techniques lately, and I’ve noticed something frustrating: most tutorials skip over the structural stuff. They show you the final result, but not the why behind the layering decisions and compositional choices that make a cinematic environment actually feel believable. That’s why I got genuinely excited learning about how professional concept artists like Killian Prevost approach this discipline from the ground up. It’s not just about beautiful renders—it’s about building a repeatable, organized workflow that scales whether you’re creating a game environment, film concept, or personal illustration.

Automating Photoshop with Scripts: The Workflow Game-Changer I Wish I'd Known Earlier
Workflow Optimization

Automating Photoshop with Scripts: The Workflow Game-Changer I Wish I'd Known Earlier

I spent three years doing the same tedious tasks in Photoshop before I realized how much time I was actually wasting. Resizing images, applying the same adjustments, renaming layers, exporting to multiple formats—it added up to hours every single week. That’s when I dove deep into Photoshop automation scripts, and honestly, I’m kicking myself for not starting sooner. The Difference Between Actions, Presets, and Scripts Before we get into the heavy lifting, let me clarify something that confused me at first.