Streamline your workflow.
Posted by Vlada Fialkovsky [Photoshop, Web Design] on April 07, 2010 in Design
Streamline your workflow.
(From freelance designer perspective.)
The key is to get maximum possible work done within the least amount of time. So use any tools you can get your hands on to streamline your work.
There are a lot of templates, special effects, collection of actions and scripts that can all speed up your workflow. Consider what you spend most of your time doing repetitively, and then see if there’s a template or an action that can do it for you.
Plug-ins. Very often people wants to learn how to do various effects directly in Photoshop without using any other software. If your goal is the knowledge itself that is one right approach, but if the goal is to save money, consider the time savings of the plug-in vs. the investment cost.
For example, there’s a great plug-in for edge and framing effects called PhotoFrame from onOne Software (www.ononesoftware.com). It does exactly what I need in 10-20 seconds. I know how to do it in Photoshop, but it takes about 15-20 minutes. Another good plug-in for softening and smoothing skin – Portraiture from Imagenomic (www.imagenomic.com) - same story, it does work faster than I do in 10 times, depending on the image. Even if you’re very fast at something in Photoshop and this plug-in only saves you 5 minutes per image, it can still pay for itself in no time.
Another useful Plug-in:
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- PhotoTool (onOne Sofware) – for Photographic Effects
- PhotoTune (onOne Sofware) – for Colour Correction
- MaskPro (onOne Sofware) – for Removing Backgrounds
