Workflow & Productivity

You're Editing Photos One at a Time Like a Chump — Here's How Batch Processing Fixed That
Workflow & Productivity

You're Editing Photos One at a Time Like a Chump — Here's How Batch Processing Fixed That

Last month I had a client send me 340 product photos that all needed the same treatment: resize to 1200x1200px, sharpen, adjust levels, export as JPEG at 85% quality. Simple enough, right? Except I sat down at my usual corner table at Epoch Coffee, opened the first image, and immediately had the thought that I really didn’t want to do this 339 more times. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that if something feels tedious before you’ve even started, there’s almost certainly a better way.

You're Editing Photos One at a Time Like It's 2009 — Here's How to Fix That
Workflow & Productivity

You're Editing Photos One at a Time Like It's 2009 — Here's How to Fix That

Last month I had a client send over 340 product photos that all needed the same treatment: resize to 1200x1200px, sharpen slightly, export as sRGB JPEGs at 85% quality. Simple enough on one image. On 340 images, sitting in a coffee shop on a Tuesday afternoon with a lukewarm oat milk latte, it started to feel like a slow-motion punishment. I know designers who would have opened every single file manually.

You're Editing Photos One at a Time Like It's 2009 — Batch Processing Will Fix That
Workflow & Productivity

You're Editing Photos One at a Time Like It's 2009 — Batch Processing Will Fix That

Last spring I took on a product photography gig that seemed straightforward enough. Sixty product shots, consistent white background, all needing the same resize, sharpen, and export treatment. I quoted two hours, opened Photoshop, and started editing image number one. I finished image number sixty-three at 1:47 in the morning. That is not a workflow. That is a punishment. And the worst part? I had done this before. Multiple times. I just kept forgetting that batch processing existed because I never sat down long enough to actually learn it properly.

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Slowing You Down — Here's How to Fix It in 20 Minutes
Workflow & Productivity

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Slowing You Down — Here's How to Fix It in 20 Minutes

I once spent 45 minutes on a client call trying to find the Character panel while screen-sharing. It wasn’t hidden behind some obscure menu. I had just, at some point, dragged it off-screen and forgotten about it. The client watched me fumble around in silence. Reader, I did not get a referral from that client. That incident was embarrassing enough to make me sit down and actually think about my workspace setup, instead of just clicking “Reset Essentials” every few months and hoping for the best.

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Probably Working Against You (Here's How to Fix It)
Workflow & Productivity

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Probably Working Against You (Here's How to Fix It)

I set up my Photoshop workspace the same way I set up my coffee shop table. Everything I need within arm’s reach, nothing I don’t need taking up space, and a very specific arrangement that would look chaotic to anyone else but makes complete sense to me. The first time a client sat next to me to review a project and watched me work, she asked if I was okay. I had panels docked in places most people don’t even know are dockable, and my toolbar was about a third of the default length.

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Slowing You Down (Here's How I Fixed Mine)
Workflow & Productivity

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Slowing You Down (Here's How I Fixed Mine)

I work almost exclusively from coffee shops. Not because I’m trying to look interesting, but because something about ambient noise and a flat white keeps me locked in. The problem is that screen real estate in a coffee shop is whatever your laptop gives you, and on a 13-inch MacBook Pro, the default Photoshop workspace is basically a panel explosion with a tiny canvas somewhere in the middle. For the first two years of freelancing, I just… lived with it.

Your Photoshop Workspace is a Mess — Here's How I Fixed Mine in 20 Minutes
Workflow & Productivity

Your Photoshop Workspace is a Mess — Here's How I Fixed Mine in 20 Minutes

I spent the better part of a Tuesday afternoon last month looking for the Properties panel. Not because it was hidden. Not because I’d closed it. It was open the whole time, just buried under three other panels on my secondary monitor in a configuration I’d apparently set up sometime in 2021 and never touched since. Meanwhile, the client on the other end of a Slack thread was waiting for a mockup revision that should have taken seven minutes.

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Costing You Time — Here's How I Fixed Mine
Workflow & Productivity

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Costing You Time — Here's How I Fixed Mine

I used to work with the default Photoshop workspace like some kind of masochist. Every panel Adobe ships turned on, the Properties panel eating half my screen, the Tools bar sitting on the left like it owned the place. I’d be mid-composite at some coffee shop on South Congress, squinting at a 13-inch MacBook screen with roughly the same usable canvas space as a Post-it note. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that a cluttered workspace isn’t just annoying.

Stop Editing Photos One at a Time: How Batch Processing Saved My Freelance Sanity
Workflow & Productivity

Stop Editing Photos One at a Time: How Batch Processing Saved My Freelance Sanity

Last spring I picked up a product photography gig that seemed straightforward enough. Two hundred product shots, clean white background, consistent color grade, client needed them by Friday. I said yes, quoted a fair price, and sat down Monday morning at my usual corner table at Epoch Coffee with what I thought was plenty of time. By Tuesday afternoon I had edited 40 images by hand. Forty. In six hours. The math on that was not doing me any favors.

You're Editing Photos One at a Time Like a Caveman — Here's How Batch Processing Fixes That
Workflow & Productivity

You're Editing Photos One at a Time Like a Caveman — Here's How Batch Processing Fixes That

Last month I took on a product photography job that seemed simple enough: retouch 340 product images for an e-commerce client. Same edits on every single one. Resize to 2000x2000px, sharpen, adjust white balance, export as sRGB JPEG at 85% quality. Clean, repetitive, boring work. My first instinct was to just… start doing them. One by one. I got through about 40 images in two hours before I wanted to throw my laptop into a lake.

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Costing You Time — Here's How to Fix It in 20 Minutes
Workflow & Productivity

Your Photoshop Workspace Is Costing You Time — Here's How to Fix It in 20 Minutes

I once watched myself spend six minutes looking for the Properties panel during a client screen share. Six minutes. The client was on the call. I was clicking through every nested panel group like a raccoon digging through trash, making small apologetic noises while my billable hour evaporated in real time. That was the day I stopped treating workspace setup as something I’d “get to eventually” and started treating it like the actual work.

Stop Editing Photos One at a Time: A Practical Guide to Photoshop Batch Processing
Workflow & Productivity

Stop Editing Photos One at a Time: A Practical Guide to Photoshop Batch Processing

Last spring I landed a product photography gig for a small Austin-based skincare brand. Forty-seven product shots, all needing the same treatment: resize to 2000x2000px, sharpen, color-correct to match their brand palette, export as sRGB JPEG at 85% quality. Simple enough. I sat down at my usual corner table at Epoch Coffee, ordered an oat latte, and started editing. Manually. One. At. A. Time. Four hours later I had gotten through eleven images, my coffee was cold, and I had developed a genuine, personal grievance against the number 47.