Posts

Actions

Building Your First Photoshop Action: Step by Step

Reading about actions is one thing. Building one is how it actually clicks. Let’s create a practical action together: a web export action that resizes an image, sharpens it, and saves it as an optimized JPEG. You’ll use this one constantly. Before You Start Open any photo in Photoshop. It doesn’t matter which — we just need an image to record the steps on. Make sure the Actions panel is visible (Window > Actions).

January 25, 2026

Plugins

The Best Photoshop Plugins for Photographers in 2026

The Photoshop plugin market is crowded with options that promise to revolutionize your workflow. Most of them don’t. After testing dozens of plugins over the past year, here are the ones that genuinely earn their place in a photographer’s toolkit. AI-Powered Masking and Selection Topaz Photo AI Topaz has consolidated their suite into a single application that handles noise reduction, sharpening, and upscaling. The AI-driven noise reduction is genuinely better than Camera Raw’s built-in version, particularly at very high ISOs (12800+).

January 21, 2026

Brushes

The Best Free Photoshop Brushes for Photographers in 2026

There are thousands of free Photoshop brush sets floating around the internet, and most of them are junk. Poorly made, oddly specific, or so low-resolution they fall apart at any reasonable canvas size. I’ve spent years collecting brushes that actually hold up in professional work. Here are the free sets that earned a permanent spot in my library. Retouching Brushes Kyle T. Webster’s Megapack (Included with CC) If you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, you already have access to Kyle Webster’s massive brush library.

January 19, 2026

Workflows

Batch Automation in Photoshop: Process 100 Images While You Sleep

Batch Automation in Photoshop: Process 100 Images While You Sleep I’ve spent countless hours watching Photoshop do the same thing over and over. Resize, color correct, add a watermark, export. Resize, color correct, add a watermark, export. About six months ago, I decided this was insane and dived deep into batch automation. What I discovered completely changed how I approach production work. If you’re still manually applying the same edits to dozens or hundreds of images, you’re wasting time you could spend on actual creative decisions.

January 18, 2026

Workflows

Batch Automation in Photoshop: Processing Hundreds of Images Without Lifting a Finger

Batch Automation in Photoshop: Processing Hundreds of Images Without Lifting a Finger I used to spend entire afternoons clicking through the same adjustments on dozens of product photos. Crop, adjust levels, add a watermark, export. Repeat 47 times. My mouse hand would cramp, my eyes would glaze over, and I’d inevitably mess up one file in the middle of the sequence. Then I actually learned how to use Photoshop’s batch automation features.

January 17, 2026