Photoshop action builder for repeating photo tasks

The frustration surfaces when someone has to do the same type of edit across 40 product photos and realizes that even though they survived the learning curve once, they have to navigate the same overwhelming menu system again every single time they open a new file. 'Choosing from so many variations takes considerable time to find what I really want' — and that time multiplies across every image in a batch.

The deeper problem is that Photoshop's native actions system is itself a power-user feature. Recording and organizing actions requires knowing exactly which sequence of steps produces the result you want, which circles back to the original problem: if you could already navigate the tools confidently, you wouldn't need help. The action system assumes competence the user doesn't have yet.

What's broken for this specific case is that there's no way for a non-expert user to express a desired outcome — 'I want all my product shots to look like this reference image' — and get back a reusable one-click sequence they can apply without understanding what's happening under the hood. They have to either hire someone, watch hours of tutorials, or accept that every session starts with the same trial-and-error described in complaints like 'sometimes convoluted, many options when I may only need one.'

This is a business because the batch-editing need recurs on a schedule for e-commerce sellers, real estate photographers, and portrait photographers — weekly or even daily. Each recurrence without an efficient workflow is a direct time cost. The buyer is often a small studio or freelancer who invoices by the hour, which means wasted navigation time has a dollar value they can feel. Adobe has no reason to build a simplified action-creation experience because it would undercut their tutorial ecosystem and their marketplace of premium presets.

What to build

Build a desktop companion app for Photoshop that lets a user upload a before-and-after pair of images, infers the likely sequence of adjustments made, and outputs a Photoshop-compatible .atn action file the user can load and apply to a batch of images in one click.

Where to start

Target Shopify sellers who photograph their own products by distributing through Shopify app directories and photography communities, because they have an immediate, measurable time cost tied to each product listing and are already comfortable paying for tools that speed up their store management.

The hard part

Accurately inferring an adjustment sequence from a before-and-after image pair is technically hard — especially for non-destructive or layer-based edits — so early versions will need to be honest about confidence level and offer a manual correction interface rather than pretending the inference is always correct.

How it makes money

Per-seat annual subscription at roughly $99-149/year, with a free tier limited to five saved action exports per month to prove value before asking for payment.