Lessons

Lesson Info

Practical Application of Bridge

Look at some of the other things we can do within those images there. So I'll go back to that favorites folder, go to bridge and then go into lets say, this one here. So this would be, see how I went through there and I just key worded all those. I would use this view, specifically for key wording because it gives me a very big perspective of all the images that might be in that folder. Really quick access to Shift+1, click on all the rest of them, and label them all Kansas City and they're all good to go. But if I wanted to start looking at these images and maybe culling these images, I could go ahead and go into my film strip view and now I see my preview. So this would be a better place for me to go to see what I want to start labeling these. So if we go to labels up here, you see that we have a bunch of different hot keys here. Ctrl+0 is no rating, Alt delete would be a reject. It's not actually going to delete it yet, it's just going to reject it. And then Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2, Ctrl+3, ...

Ctrl+4, Ctrl+ are your star ratings and then you can decrease that rating by pressing the period or comma. And then we have our cool labels remember, winner winner chicken dinner. Like that good shot, yes that's the one I'm going to keep. And then things that we might want to process, things that we might want to throw away we can start Ctrl clicking on those images. And that does get housed in the EXIF data of that image. So even if we're over here and we look at this from, see here we have a rating here, right here that rating. That rating is housed in the EXIF data. So if I were to come up to this image, doesn't have a rating on it yet, click on this image and just say, you know what this may be something that I want to process. I'm very restrictive of my five stars, cause I always think I have room for improvement. So a four star for me is a wicked good image, a three star is eh, it's okay. Two star I might do something with that if I have to do a whole ton of work to it. And a one star is basically if you don't clean up your act you're gonna get deleted, okay. So this image, I could probably do something with it so maybe Ctrl+3. So now if I go over to here and then look at this image, it didn't do it but, yeah. Maybe it might take some time to catch up. But if I were open this in to Adobe Camera Raw, double click it open it in Adobe Camera Raw. Adobe Camera Raw also has that star rating, you would see that star rating in there to because it's housed in that EXIF data. So then I would just go through these images and I would look at them and I'd say, okay, this one is a maybe, it's a maybe. Maybe we can do something with that. With this one again it's a maybe. And then I'd just right click and use my right arrow, clicking through and then say, not as good as the last one. I kind of like the symmetry there, three maybe. No, I could probably delete you. I like the fish eye, that's pretty cool, Ctrl+3. Ctrl+3. That's more of a documentary image, it's mainly meant to showcase where I was. So maybe, Ctrl+2. Ctrl+2. That's kind of cool, Ctrl+3. Again, Liberty Memorial, document image. I could probably just Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2. This one I kinda like, I could do Ctrl+3. And there was one in here that I really like so I'll just keep moving through this. Kind of speed this up a little bit. I really like that one so Ctrl+3. There's one, right, here. Love this image. Why I like this image so much is because the way that the clouds just look like their right about to wrap around that Liberty Memorial. So I might Ctrl+4 this one and on top of that I might also Ctrl+6, or Ctrl+8 this one. (laughing) I don't want to throw that one away, no don't wanna go away. This would be one that now tells me, okay you like this one you gave it four stars and you also put a green label on it. So if I'm in this folder and I look over here on the left hand side, we got something called the filter. If I click on the filter, the filter is awesome. The filter can do some really cool things. So I'll go back to the essentials view so you can see how this works. We go to the filter, if it does not have a label I can check that box over there next to it. So anything that doesn't have a label, show me all the things that are not labeled yet, okay. I see all the ones that are not labeled yet. How about anything that's really good. Well I only have one really good one from that whole shot. So if I'm culling my images, I'm going through all those photographs that might be in there. Maybe there's 300 images in there. And I'm putting my star ratings on there and I'm putting my labels on there and I'm doing it all really correctly. By the time I'm done culling those images, that might take me, you know because I'm pretty good and pretty quick at it now, that might take me 10 minutes. By the time that 10 minutes is done, I'm not second guessing or question marking myself, what images should I process from that day. I know exactly because I filtered it out, which one is the winner winner chicken dinner, lets do this. Okay, I can open that up in Photoshop, open it up in Adobe Camera Raw, start working my magic on it and I'm good to go. If it has no rating on it, we can click no rating cause that maybe tells me, "Hey, you didn't rate these ones yet, "you went through your first pass "and these don't have a rating on them yet." okay well I don't need to look through there individually and say which ones doesn't have a rating on it. That tells me right away, hey you might want to rate these cause some of these do look kinda good, okay. Or I could say okay which one's were the ones that I really wanted to get rid of, that one. I don't really care for too much. If I wanted to get rid of it I could just right click and I could delete it. It's going to ask me, "Are you sure you want to send this to the recycle bin?" Yes and I can turn this off so it doesn't ask me again. But there might times where I want that little, "Hey, dude, you sure you want to do this, "are you really sure you wanna do this?" Okay, yes, go. And then we have, you can check multiples though. So if I check the one and the two, you see how there's two check marks there? Maybe I just want to check the three. Or what's my three and four. Or what's my three, and four, and my winner winner chicken dinner. I guess it's gonna override it when it goes to labels there. So, the other things that's cool about these filters is you can say even what filters you want to be in here as well. So If I right click, all of these things are things that could be filterable. From the ratings to the file type to the key words to who ever the author is. The date is was created, the day it was modified. There's some that are probably going to be less useful than others but then there's those ones like has any of these been through camera raw yet. If I click right here, it's gonna tell me that none of these have been through camera raw yet. And I can also see that because if it has been through camera raw, I know we're kinda gonna put cart before the horse here a little bit but I'll just go ahead and click on this image. If I double click on this it's gonna open it up in Photoshop which because it's a raw file, raw files automatically open up in Adobe Camera Raw as the hand off between Bridge and Photoshop. So I'm just gonna go ahead and press the auto button, it looks pretty good and press done. So now when I go into Bridge, see up here what changed. This now has a couple of sliders on there that tells me that that image has been run through Adobe Camera Raw and it does in fact have settings. If you also double click on this and you crop it, let's crop it in like this, press done. You also see that not only does it have settings but what it's showing me is the cropped version of that image as well. So it's pretty smart, pretty intuitive. So if we were to look down here at Camera Raw now, which one's have been cropped. That one's been cropped. Which one has settings for Adobe Camera Raw? We can also look at things from, let's say, key words. Find anything that's key worded Kansas City in here. So this is finding anything right now that's key worded, it's a two star or a four star, or it's a three star or a four star image that has been key worded. If I turn those key words off, if I turn those star ratings off, it's just gonna give me all that were from Kansas City. So you can get really detailed in this. You can say, "What are the ones that "are just labeled Liberty Memorial from there," and "What are my three stars from Liberty Memorial?" Boom, good to go, those are the ones that I would process. I'm good to go. Now part of this is developing good habits, okay. The worst habit you can develop when you're doing this type of management system is probably to think about it in terms of light room. And I don't say that because I don't like Light Room or anything, it's just if you want to do this and you want to use this way of finding your images you're gonna have to get good at labeling your folders and having one folder that contains all of your images. So I have one folder and I literally call it, Dated Photography. So if I were to go into, let's just go to my desktop and I'll make a new folder here. Right click, new folder, Dated Photography. That folder is going to have all the images that I'm gonna take, they're gonna come from my camera. Every time I get my memory card from a shoot I pull out that memory card, put it into my computer, I go to my Dated Photography folder, I double click on that, open it up, right click in here, New folder and then I'm gonna date that exactly what that date was that I shot. And I'm also going to do something else. I'm going to put some type of key word in that folder specifically that lets me know what I did, where I was and where I was going with that. So if I go 2018, the 12th, so yesterday I was shooting, 0311 and I type Pikes Place. All the images that I shot from yesterday would go into this folder. So I would find that memory card get those images off that memory card, drag them and drop them into that Pikes Place folder, specifically dated like this. Now one of the things that I think I have like a maybe a, what would I call it, a picture memory, or something like that. There's probably a technical term for it. But if you say, "Blake I need a picture of an elephant." I could more than likely within less than 30 seconds go back to 2014 when I went to the zoo with my son on March 2014 and find that elephant picture. So this way of doing things is very conducive for me. You've got to set up some type of file structure, some type of folder structure that is conducive for you. So a lot of types the question comes in well, "2018, "2017, 2016, this would be one giant folder, "I don't have that kind of folder space" and that's true. So what I would do is, in here you would see a 2017 folder in it's own folder. Right here. (typing) That would contain all of the images from 2017. So what I do is I take that folder and that's what I start backing up. I'm backing up my stuff all the time and I do it all manually. I know there's automated processes that back things up but I'm still old school. All of my drives have, I just sticky note the junk out of them and I can write on them when I last backed them up. So not only do I know that I backed it up based off of okay, I backed it up in January or February, whatever that might have been, I also write the day that I backed it up on that drive. And I write what folders I backed up and when I did that. So I have a working 2018 series of folders here and I have anything that was shot in 2017 here. And then I have another archive somewhere else completely for 2016, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10. And all that stuff is handled on a different drive. But because Bridge is smart enough to look through my entire computer, I can also create places on my computer that, so like this Volume D here. This has a C and a D drive. My computer has all the way through a K drive cause I have so many different terabyte drives in there that I can access right from bridge and still be making smart collections and regular collections from those backup places. So really just, you have to develop some good habits when you're doing this as well. You know as far as opening images we've talked about setting up Bridge, exactly the way you want it to be. We've talked about the modular set up. We've talked about how we can do key words and filters, collections, and smart collections. And culling photographs. So if I were to cull my photographs, let me go over that really quickly on another series of images. Let's go ahead and look at this one right here. So these are all images I took from Chicago not to long ago. If I'm culling these images, I'm gonna go ahead and go to my key words, I'm gonna to my places. Right click, I'm gonna add a new key word. Call that Chicago. (typing) Drag this into Places. All of these, again, I just Shift click, call it Chicago. Now I know that they're all key worded really quickly. Already done. So I go to my film strip view. And I do like to take pictures from the airplane. I use these a lot for backgrounds. I use them specifically for things you don't even realize. I probably use it as a really blurred background for some text or something that might go on my blog or it might go on a post or something like that. So this do I think it's an amazing shot, no, but for the fact that I might use it for something else, Ctrl+2. And because these are all very much the same if I Shift click and press Ctrl+ now they are all hot keyed to a two star. I thought this was pretty cool, Ctrl+3. And then we'll do, what you might not be seeing here is if I have my pinky set to the arrow key and then my forefinger on the Ctrl key and then this hand on the numbers. I'm telling you, it sounds silly but that's a work flow thing. I can then click through with my pinky, control click and control click. So I'm going to Ctrl+1 this, click on the pinky, Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2, Ctrl+3 I like that, Ctrl+2, Ctrl+2, Ctrl+2, Ctrl+2,Ctrl+2, Ctrl+ Ctrl+2, kinda like that, Ctrl+3. Too similar. Ctrl+2, this was an accident, I like to keep accidents. (laughing) I had my camera set to, the Sony's have this it's called smooth reflection, it's an app that can automatically take like 200 pictures and stitch them together automatically on raw file to make it look like a long exposure image. Well that's what these were and then I was trying to take a picture and I was like, "Oh, crap," as I'm like fumbling with my camera it's taking three or four different pictures. It was kind of a happy accident, I kinda of liked it. But you see here how this is set off to the right hand side like that, I need that to be rotated. So I can rotate that right here within Bridge. I don't have to go into Camera Raw to do that. I can just go ahead and rotate that right there. Ctrl+2, Ctrl+3, I like that straight. I have a broken bubble level in my head, probably like most of us. Everything's always, oh that's pretty cool. (clicking) And when I'm Ctrl+3-ing these, these are probably images that I would pull into Adobe Camera Raw and work on just to see what they would look like and then I might even do another pass on them. So let me just Ctrl+3 that one, all these. That I really like, I'd probably Ctrl+4, Ctrl+3, Ctrl+3. And when I'm looking at that instinctively, like this, the reason why I like this is that I've got all four corners of my image have some data in it and it brings you right to the top of that image. Well why would you Ctrl+4 that one and not that one. Well because I don't have that upper left hand corner so it's not as dynamic as that image would be. So a lot of times you just don't go through here randomly, you're making instinctive decisions about these. And a lot of times when I'm doing this and I'm culling these images, I'm making the instinctive decision really quickly to just star these and rate these and then after I've done one pass, I'll do another pass. Do I still feel that way? Okay, if I do, then I'll either up or down the rating on that. So the cool thing about this is if I have all of these selected, I can click on this one and then through this one and I don't have to just open one image at a time, I can open up three images or five or whatever, as many as I want to in Photoshop. So if I were to click and hold these, I could, I have to do it from the file, click and hold these right from here. I could bring these into Photoshop like this or I could've sent them right to Adobe Camera Raw. I just wanted to show you that because they're raw files you can click and drag a raw file into the working space of Photoshop and they will all open up in Adobe Camera Raw. So we're gonna get into Adobe Camera Raw in the next lesson and from there I'll teach you all kinds of crazy, cool things about Adobe Camera Raw. As far as batch editing, multiple images that's just like you would see here. We did cover quite a bit on Bridge, we covered quite a bit on Photoshop so I'm just going to open up the floor here to questions. I think I'll open it over here Blake, thanks for asking. This one from John Santini, if you delete a photo from Bridge is it deleted from your file structure on your hard drive as well? That is a great question, I'm going to go ahead and cancel out of here and show you this. If you are in Bridge and let's say this image right here. If I were to right click on this and say, Delete. It's gonna ask me right away, "Are you sure you want "to send this to the Recycle Bin?" So what that's telling me that it's not the Bridge Recycle Bin, that is my computers Recycle Bin. So yes, because this is just a shell that's going on top of the chassis, the chassis whatever they call that thing, of Windows it will be physically removing that from Windows. On top of that to, if I right click on this and I were to duplicate it, it is going to make an exact duplicate copy of that raw file. So much so that if I were to go into that folder structure and click on, I was in Chicago, we should see a copy in here. Don't prove me wrong, yep right here, there's that copy. So whatever you do in Bridge, it's making those duplicates. The only copy out there would be if it's in a collection. If it's in a collection, especially like this Test Collection that we have here, if it's in a collection and you right click and you remove it from the collection, right here where it says Remove From Collection. It's not going to remove it from your computer, it's only going to remove it from that temporary state within Bridge and it will stay exactly where it was on your PC. Great and then a question from earlier, Betsy would like to know how many collections can you have? That's a great question. I've never made more collections that would tell me I can't have anymore. You can have plenty. You can have plenty of collections. Yeah that I don't really know, I've never reached the depth of my collections, my wife would disagree. And this is an interesting question from BD Gordon, is there a process you use for saving from Photoshop so you retain an original, raw file? From Photoshop to retain an original, raw file. That's a great question because Photoshop itself cannot necessarily save a raw file. So Adobe Camera Raw saves things into the XMP Sidecar file or if it's a DNG it saves it right into the DNG Data. But if you're in Photoshop it's not actually working on the raw file because it has a change over. The change over from Bridge to Adobe Camera Raw and the change over from Adobe Camera Raw into Photoshop. There's a change over that happens between there, the change over that happens between Camera Raw and Photoshop is that you lose that raw editing capabilities essentially. So if you wanted to retain as much information as possible within that image after you edit it within Photoshop I would use something like a PSD file or if you flatten it down some, a TID file. That way you are retaining as much data as possible to get it as close as possible to a raw file. Does that sound about right? Yep, that sounds good, great. On your collections, if you deleted the file through Bridge will it take it out of that collection also? Yes because the collection is just a collection of what's on the computer. It's like a, it's basically just a, like a shortcut. So does it give you a warning or anything when it's gonna take it out of there? For instance, you make a collection of your favorites, but then you move a folder off onto another drive or delete the folder entirely and it takes things out of that collection does it tell you that it's doing that or? I don't believe so, but we can test it. If I go to my folders and let's go to those favorites folders and let's go to here. Right click on this one and we'll call this, let's make it the first one. Right click on this and add to favorites. Oops, I'm all over the place. That always happens when you're live right. So if we go to our collections and add this to our collections, so it's in our collection now. We see that in our collection. We go back to that folder. (clicking) There goes the second Kansas City Folder, this one. And we delete this. Go back to our collections. It just disappears, it doesn't tell you, "Hey when you remove this, you're going to remove "it from the collection." It just goes away because it's just a short cut essentially. Alright and one other question not related to that. When you were setting up Bridge, you skipped over the cache segment for setting that up. Is there a preferred size of cache to empty it out on closing Bridge? That would be up to you, I mean it depends on how much space you have for caching. If you don't have a whole lot of space on your computer for caching, then it might be a good idea. But I have, this might sound silly but I whole one terabyte drive on my computer that is specifically for Photoshop caching and that is what I would direct that to. So I never have to worry too much about those caches so if you don't have a whole lot of space, I would say you probably want to purge that cache more often than if you have a lot of space. Question here regarding, you did Shift earlier to do a whole row of pictures for example when you were removing them, tagging them what have you, you can hit control and specifically choose what pictures you want so, you could pick one, 14, 17, and whatever by hitting control or something like that instead of shit? Absolutely so if I just wanted these and these I want every other one, if I control click it's gonna go every other one. If I shift click, it's going to take all of them. And if I control click after I shift click, it will remove those. Yeah, that's a good thing to point out, thank you. Question here, may you add a folder to a collection? A folder to a collection, let's see. I don't know if I've ever tried to do that. Click on folders, to collections. No, I'm getting a big whopping no. However, there's always a however, right. If I were to make a smart collection, it could be a smart collection that looks at folder. So if we were to go to new Smart Collection and what's the criteria. Instead of key words I believe you can do folders here. Maybe not, maybe not. No, that's a big no. Let's scroll up, no. By file name, file size, no folder. So what you could do with that though is instead of making a collection for that folder you could make a favorite for that folder. So a collection is more a series of shortcuts that gets from one place to another within Bridge. If you were to make a favorite and right click on any one of those folders, like this folder I can right click on this and say, Add to Favorites. That favorite becomes a folder. Basically that would be kind of like a folder collection, essentially. Great, awesome, Blake thank you so much. Day one down and done, we have 19 more to go so just want to let the folks, we're just going to wrap things up here. Just want to let you guys out there on the internet know how boot camps here at Creative Live work. This is basically a 20 day course, we'll have well over a hundred lessons and we film about, between an hour and 90 minutes each day in the morning and then that class gets looped for 24 hours and then you'll have day two tomorrow. Now we're back live again tomorrow with ACR. I know if you guys are fans of Photoshop you find that when you open a raw file, the first thing you go into is Adobe Camera Raw. Well Blake will be covering it tomorrow from A to Z. This bootcamp, as I mentioned, what a package it is. We're talking 20 days over a hundred lessons and we have some amazing bonus materials. Blake has a package of textures that he's going to give to you for free if you purchase. We have cloud backgrounds, we have other support files. So as you go through the boot camp you'll find that we have support files that Blake is using. Photographs that you guys can follow along, of course that is with purchase only. And the icing on the cake, we've never done this before. Blake is including a plug in for Photoshop. If you purchase the class you can download that plug in and install it into Photoshop. Blake, in a couple short words, tell us what that plug in will do once they install it in Photoshop. You can just talk us through it a little bit. Absolutely, it's basically a, what I call a work flow system. We're gonna talk about things like luminosity masking, we're gonna talk about blend if, we're gonna talk about making your own custom effects that you can do. We're also gonna be talking about actions. So essentially what this thing is, it's like a remote control for a television. You push a button and it turns the volume up, well when you push a button and it'll give you a luminosity mask for your highlights, your mid-tones, or your shadows. And it'll also allow you to control your blend if right from there. So it's basically a work flow, work horse to help you speed up things and get a little more efficient from the knowledge you've developed from this course. I don't want you to think that this is going to be your, what do you call it, your one trick pony. It's not a one trick pony. No it's pretty cool.