If it works, it works!

HOT TAKE: Regardless of how you edit an image, at the end of the day, you end up with pixels in a file that you post presumably online, or maybe you send to a printer to get something for your walls. The end result is the same. How you go about getting there, well, that depends.

And that's why I urge you to not necessarily discount AI tools, but at the same time, don't become heavily reliant on them. A Photoshop Action simply leverages Photoshop's tools and functions. And it does it potentially in a way that the average retoucher may not know to do. People like myself, we do countless hours of research and development to create powerful Actions that do functions that the average user probably doesn't even know exist. In other cases, we make functions way faster and way more convenient rather than doing things manually.

Finally, I make Actions that are extremely flexible and adaptable and can be updated very quickly when Adobe makes changes to Photoshop. This sort of lightweight development is crucial to ensuring that NBP keeps up with emerging changes when it comes to Adobe development.

So by all means, use Evoto or Retouch4Me or whatever tools are working for you, even the face retouching of Capture One has been pretty solid. But don't discount the power of Photoshop and tried and true methods that have worked for a long time for very good reasons. If you want control, if you wanna ensure that you know exactly what your pixels are doing, nothing beats the manual approach, with the right tools.