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Freeze It or Blur It: A Field Guide to Action Photography Techniques
Video Tutorials

Freeze It or Blur It: A Field Guide to Action Photography Techniques

Most of my work happens in a controlled studio environment. Product shots, ad composites, e-commerce catalogs where the subject sits perfectly still under lights I’ve positioned myself. Action photography is basically the opposite of everything I do daily, which is exactly why I find it so useful to study. Understanding how to handle fast-moving subjects makes you a sharper photographer across the board, and the decision-making process behind shutter speed selection translates directly into better exposure instincts no matter what you’re shooting.

The Workflow Stack I Actually Use After 15 Years in Commercial Post-Production
Workflow & Productivity

The Workflow Stack I Actually Use After 15 Years in Commercial Post-Production

There’s a specific kind of misery that comes from doing the same Photoshop task 200 times in a row. I know this because I lived it, about nine years ago, when a client handed me a folder of 200 product images that all needed the same crop, resize, and export sequence. I did the first thirty by hand before something in my brain snapped. I spent the rest of that day learning how to script the whole thing.

How to Record a Photoshop Action and Batch Process an Entire Folder of Images
Video Tutorials

How to Record a Photoshop Action and Batch Process an Entire Folder of Images

I built my first Photoshop Action at 26 and I have not manually repeated a multi-step edit since. That sounds like an exaggeration but I track this stuff obsessively, and the number currently sits at over 2,400 hours saved across my career. So when someone asks me why Actions are worth learning, I don’t give them a philosophical answer. I give them a number. The specific workflow I want to walk you through today comes from a tutorial by Aaron Nace over at PHLEARN.

Dodge & Burn Like a Painter: Building a Pressure-Sensitive Brush in Photoshop
Video Tutorials

Dodge & Burn Like a Painter: Building a Pressure-Sensitive Brush in Photoshop

Fifteen years of studio work taught me that dodging and burning separates the retouchers from the photo editors. Anyone can pull a Curves adjustment. Shaping light on a face, a product surface, or a landscape so it reads as three-dimensional and intentional – that takes control. Real, granular, stroke-by-stroke control. For most of my career I was doing it with a mouse, convincing myself that lowering brush flow to 5% was “good enough.

How to Get Lightroom Presets Working on Your Phone (Yes, Really)
Video Tutorials

How to Get Lightroom Presets Working on Your Phone (Yes, Really)

I’ll be straight with you: I resisted mobile editing for a long time. Fifteen years of working in commercial studios will do that to you. My workflow lives on a calibrated monitor, a fast desktop, and a filing system that would make most archivists nervous. But clients don’t care about any of that when they’re texting you at 8 p.m. asking why their Instagram post isn’t up yet. The phone has become a legitimate part of the job, and that means the editing tools need to follow.

Beyond Actions: How Photoshop Automation Scripts Actually Think (And Why It Changes Everything)
Workflow Automation

Beyond Actions: How Photoshop Automation Scripts Actually Think (And Why It Changes Everything)

The first time I spent an entire workday doing the same crop-and-resize task 200 times, I told myself it was a one-off. It wasn’t. Three weeks later I was back in the same chair, same file naming convention, same repetitive hand motion, watching the clock. That afternoon I opened Google and typed “how to automate Photoshop.” It took me about 48 hours of fumbling through forums to write something useful. That was fifteen years ago, and I have not manually repeated a batch task since.

Build Once, Retouch Forever: Creating an AI-Powered Adaptive Portrait Preset in Lightroom
Video Tutorials

Build Once, Retouch Forever: Creating an AI-Powered Adaptive Portrait Preset in Lightroom

If there is one thing fifteen years in commercial photography has taught me, it is that the tasks you repeat most often are the ones worth eliminating first. Portrait retouching is my clearest example. Every shoot comes with the same list: smooth the skin a touch, pop the eyes slightly, add a little life to the lips, deepen the hair. The adjustments are almost always the same. The execution, until recently, was manual every single time.

Stop Painting with Generic Brushes: How to Build Free, High-Quality Custom Brushes in Photoshop
Video Tutorials

Stop Painting with Generic Brushes: How to Build Free, High-Quality Custom Brushes in Photoshop

Every so often I’ll be retouching a composite for a client and I hit the same wall: the default Photoshop brush set just doesn’t have what I need. The standard round brushes are fine for blocking in masks, but the moment a project calls for realistic texture, organic edges, or painterly detail, they fall flat fast. I’ve bought brush packs over the years, and some of them are excellent, but there’s a constant nagging feeling that a pre-made pack is always someone else’s creative fingerprint, not mine.

Building a Fall Color Preset in Lightroom: A Layer-by-Layer Breakdown
Video Tutorials

Building a Fall Color Preset in Lightroom: A Layer-by-Layer Breakdown

Every autumn I get a flood of requests from agency clients who shot outdoor campaigns in September and October and are now staring at RAW files that look like any other month. The foliage was stunning on location. On screen it reads beige. The problem isn’t exposure or white balance. It’s that fall color lives in a very specific tonal and hue relationship, and your all-purpose travel preset was never built to honor it.

6 Premiere Pro Plugins That Actually Change How Fast You Edit
Video Tutorials

6 Premiere Pro Plugins That Actually Change How Fast You Edit

I track time the way some people track calories. Right now my spreadsheet shows 2,400-plus hours saved through automated workflows across Photoshop alone. So when I watch a tutorial from someone who’s clearly put in the same obsessive thinking about shaving minutes off repetitive tasks, I pay close attention. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube – it’s from Mango Street, and the creator brings 12 years of Premiere Pro experience to a tight rundown of six plugins that genuinely move the needle.

Tonal Separation in Forest and Waterfall Scenes: Lessons from William Patino's NZ Landscape Workflow
Video Tutorials

Tonal Separation in Forest and Waterfall Scenes: Lessons from William Patino's NZ Landscape Workflow

There is a category of image that breaks my usual batch-processing brain completely: dense forest scenes with waterfalls, layered greens, and dappled light. In commercial work I can automate a lot. I built my first Photoshop action at 26 and have barely repeated a manual task since. But these organic, tonal-heavy nature shots demand something different. They demand judgment at the RAW stage that no action can substitute for. That is exactly what pulled me into this William Patino tutorial on NZ landscape photography workflow.

How to Turn Any Stock Image Into Custom Photoshop Brushes (Spatter Effects the Smart Way)
Video Tutorials

How to Turn Any Stock Image Into Custom Photoshop Brushes (Spatter Effects the Smart Way)

Every studio I’ve worked in over the past 15 years has had the same gap in its toolkit: people spending money on individual texture assets when a smarter approach to sourcing and defining custom brushes would give them ten times the mileage for the same cost. I hit this wall myself early on in my consultancy work, particularly when clients started asking for grunge and ink-spatter treatments on ad campaigns. I was grabbing one-off stock images, masking them out manually, and dragging them around as smart objects.