Workflow

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 me 340 product photos that all needed the same treatment: resize to 1200x1200px, sharpen slightly, convert to sRGB, export as JPEG at 85% quality. I know, thrilling stuff. The old version of me would have cracked my knuckles, opened the first image, and started manually grinding through them like some kind of artisanal photo monk. The new version of me had it done before my second coffee arrived.

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.

Stop Clicking Through Menus Like It's 2009: How to Build Custom Keyboard Shortcuts in Photoshop
Video Tutorials

Stop Clicking Through Menus Like It's 2009: How to Build Custom Keyboard Shortcuts in Photoshop

I have a complicated relationship with keyboard shortcuts. On one hand, I genuinely believe they’re the single biggest factor separating a fast Photoshop workflow from a slow one. On the other hand, I spent the first two years of my freelance career almost entirely ignoring them, clicking through nested menus like some kind of digital archaeologist hunting for buried commands. It cost me real time, real money, and real embarrassment when a client watched me do it over a screen share.

Stop Choking Your Hard Drive: The Lightroom External Drive Workflow That Keeps Your System Fast
Video Tutorials

Stop Choking Your Hard Drive: The Lightroom External Drive Workflow That Keeps Your System Fast

I run Photoshop from a coffee shop table most days, which means my laptop is doing a lot of heavy lifting on not a lot of real estate. For a long time I treated my internal drive like a junk drawer, just dumping everything on it and wondering why things got sluggish around deadline. It wasn’t until I watched this older KelbyOne tutorial, PhotoshopUser TV Episode 293{target="_blank"}, that I realized my file management habits were basically sabotaging my own machine.

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.

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.

Adobe Just Put Photoshop Inside Slack—And It Actually Might Save Your Life
News

Adobe Just Put Photoshop Inside Slack—And It Actually Might Save Your Life

Your Slack Workspace Just Became a Creative Studio I’ll be honest—when I first heard Adobe was throwing a bunch of creative tools into Slack, my initial reaction was something like “cool, but why?” Then I actually thought about it, and now I’m convinced this is either going to revolutionize how creative teams work or become the most ignored feature in Slack history. There’s really no middle ground here. Here’s the deal: Adobe just packed over 70 tools from Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and their other creative apps directly into Slack.

The Photoshop Shortcuts I Actually Use (And the Ones Everyone Else Just Pretends To)
Tips & Tricks

The Photoshop Shortcuts I Actually Use (And the Ones Everyone Else Just Pretends To)

I timed myself the other day, just out of curiosity. One hour of client work, and I hit the keyboard instead of the mouse somewhere around 200 times. Some of those were shortcuts I’ve been using so long they’re basically muscle memory. A few were ones I picked up embarrassingly recently. And at least three were me accidentally pressing the wrong thing and then furiously hitting Ctrl+Z like I was playing a rhythm game.

Scott Kelby's ON1 Photo RAW Max Workflow: The Order That Actually Makes Sense
Video Tutorials

Scott Kelby's ON1 Photo RAW Max Workflow: The Order That Actually Makes Sense

There’s a particular kind of creative paralysis that hits when you open a new piece of software and stare at seventeen panels you don’t understand. I’ve been there with ON1 Photo RAW more than once. I knew it could do impressive things. I’d seen the demo videos. But every time I launched it alongside my usual Lightroom and Photoshop setup, I’d poke around for twenty minutes, feel mildly confused, and go back to what I knew.

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.

Stop Clicking Around: How to Actually Choose the Right Selection Tool in Photoshop
Tools & Techniques

Stop Clicking Around: How to Actually Choose the Right Selection Tool in Photoshop

I had a client ask me to cut out a model from a white studio background last year. Simple job. Twenty seconds, maybe. I watched the file come through, opened it, and instinctively reached for the Quick Selection tool out of habit. Four minutes later I was still cleaning up jagged edges around flyaway hair and quietly hating myself. The Object Selection tool with a quick mask refinement would have had it done in under a minute.

Stop Mousing Around: Layer Mask Shortcuts That Actually Save You Time
Video Tutorials

Stop Mousing Around: Layer Mask Shortcuts That Actually Save You Time

I’ll be honest: for an embarrassingly long time, I was that person clicking through every layer mask operation like I had all the time in the world. Click to add the mask, click to select it, click to disable it, click to view it. My mouse hand was getting a workout my brain wasn’t. It wasn’t until I watched Dave Cross walk through his layer mask shortcut workflow in this KelbyOne episode of Photoshop User TV that I realized how much friction I’d been building into my own process.