Creative Cloud

Stop Reinstalling Your Photoshop Plug-ins Every Time Adobe Drops a New Version
Video Tutorials

Stop Reinstalling Your Photoshop Plug-ins Every Time Adobe Drops a New Version

Every time Adobe pushes a major Photoshop update, I go through the same five stages of grief. Denial that I have to update at all. Anger when I realize my plug-ins are gone. Bargaining with myself about whether I actually need Nik Collection that badly. Depression when a client job requires it. And finally, reluctant acceptance as I spend an hour reinstalling everything from scratch. If you’ve been living this cycle, I have good news: there’s a better way, and I only wish someone had shown it to me two years ago.

Turn a Plant (or Any Object) Into a Seamless Photoshop Pattern Using Your Phone
Video Tutorials

Turn a Plant (or Any Object) Into a Seamless Photoshop Pattern Using Your Phone

I used to make patterns the hard way. Define pattern from a manually tiled layer, tweak the offset, realize the seams were visible, start over, repeat until I hated myself. It worked, eventually, but it was the kind of workflow that made me question my career choices. So when I came across this Aaron Nace (PHLEARN) tutorial on using Adobe Capture to build patterns straight from your phone and beam them into Photoshop wirelessly, I watched it twice and immediately opened the App Store.

Stop Losing Assets Between Projects: How Photoshop Libraries Actually Work
Video Tutorials

Stop Losing Assets Between Projects: How Photoshop Libraries Actually Work

I used to email myself PSDs. Not proud of it. We’re talking dragging files into Gmail like some kind of digital cave person, because I had no reliable system for moving assets between machines or sharing them with collaborators. Fonts would go missing, logo files would live in seventeen different folders named “final,” “final_v2,” and “ACTUAL_FINAL,” and every new project started with a twenty-minute archaeological dig through my desktop. Turns out, Photoshop had been quietly solving this problem for years and I just wasn’t paying attention.

Stop Photoshop From Secretly Saving Your Files to the Cloud (And Fix Save As While You're At It)
Video Tutorials

Stop Photoshop From Secretly Saving Your Files to the Cloud (And Fix Save As While You're At It)

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve saved a file, closed Photoshop, gone hunting for it in my project folder, and come up completely empty. For the longest time I blamed myself. Bad naming conventions, wrong folder, classic me. Then I started blaming the coffee shop WiFi, which honestly tracks. But the real culprit was a default setting Adobe quietly changed in 2022 that redirected my saves to Creative Cloud instead of my local drive, without ever making that particularly obvious.

How to Make 3D Text Glow Like a Neon Sign in Photoshop (Using Illumination Materials)
Video Tutorials

How to Make 3D Text Glow Like a Neon Sign in Photoshop (Using Illumination Materials)

There’s a particular kind of client brief that shows up every few months in my inbox: “We want it to feel retro. Like neon. You know, glowy.” And for a long time, my answer involved stacking a bunch of Gaussian blurs and Outer Glow layer styles and hoping the client didn’t zoom in too close. It worked. Barely. But it never looked like actual light bouncing off a surface, because it wasn’t.