Lessons

Lesson Info

The Bridge Interface

There are three main parts to Photoshop. The first part of Photoshop is Bridge, and Bridge is a file manager, and an access point to Photoshop. Then there's Adobe Camera Raw. Adobe Camera Raw is the RAW editor and kind of multi-tool of all your RAW files and how they're processed before going into Photoshop. And then you have Photoshop. Photoshop is the workhorse, it's the most powerful editing tool on the planet. I strongly stand by that, and there's nothing better in my personal opinion than Photoshop. After working a lot with a lot with a lot of different programs and plug-ins, it's pretty evident, especially after you take this course and see what it can do. Now, the question that's gonna come in is, well, what about Lightroom? Lightroom, you can use Lightroom as well, and Lightroom, these two functions combined are essentially what Lightroom is, and Lightroom also has cataloging built-in to that as well, to help you with managing your photos. So, if you're watching this, and you s...

ay, I don't really wanna use Bridge, I don't wanna use Camera Raw, that's fine. I'm not going to be talking about Lightroom here. I'm not going to be talking about Lightroom at all during this course. A couple reasons, because it's kind of separated from Photoshop, and Photoshop already has these two parts that can make up the Lightroom part. And the other reason is I just, I don't use Lightroom. I don't have it installed. I prefer not to use Lightroom, and you'll see why as I talk about Bridge. So, let's go ahead, we're gonna hop over to the computer here and talk about Bridge. So, to find Bridge, first of all, once you install Adobe, the Creative Cloud, that's kind of a tongue twister, once you install the Adobe Creative Cloud, you're gonna have, this is like your command center, your access point to all things that you own within the Photoshop subscription spectrum. So you can see here I've go Photoshop, I can open that if I want to. Lightroom here, obviously I'm not lying, I don't even have it installed. (chuckles) And then we have Bridge right here, so we can get to Bridge by opening Bridge through here. If you don't have open here and you have something next to it that says install, then you'll just go ahead and make sure that you install Bridge. If at any time you need to unistall it, you can come over here to the little drop down arrow and uninstall Bridge, and reinstall Bridge, if you need to. So I'm gonna go ahead and, I already have it open here, it's like a cooking show, it's already pre-baked right? To understand Bridge, before we even go into the depths of Bridge, 'cause Bridge does have depths, I'm gonna make Bridge cool again. That's the whole point of this, okay? (chuckles) A lot of people don't think Bridge is cool, but I think it's awesome. Bridge is kind of like my car, in a way. Not like the car manufacturing plant that we saw before, but I have a Scion XD. Yes, I drive a very tiny little car, and I love it. The car's paid off, it's great! No worries there. But that Scion XD is a car that is built, the style of the car, or the shell of the car, looks like a Scion XD, but it's actually built on the chassis of a Toyota Yaris. So the Toyota Yaris is a car, the Scion XD is a car. They just took they way it looks off of one car and swapped the way it looks with another car. And that's exactly what Bridge does. Bridge is not its own engine, it's a design that goes over top of your current file management system. You have to think of my file management system, which is what I use Windows for, my file management system, this is just a very pretty view of what my computer looks like in a way that's conducive for photographers. So now if I were go on my Windows desktop, and go into one of these folders, like this one here, and go into here, you can see, looking at these images, it's not very conducive for a photographer. It's just this is the Windows' view. Yeah, if I click on this and I've got my view setup, I can see some of the exif data over here, but it's just not a very conducive way for me to look at this as far as a photographer is concerned. But what Bridge does, is Bridge just takes my current file structure, my current file system, whatever file structure and whatever file system I'm using, and it puts, like a, just a pretty little cover over it, and allows me to see it with a photographers hat on. I know that because if I look over there under either Favorites of Folders, this is essentially the structure of my folders and where I am right now. So if I were to just pull this apart like that, and pull this down like that, you can see that I am in Windows, I am on the Lessons here, under day one of our whole Photoshop boot camp course. And that's exactly what I would see if I went into Windows, double-clicked on my Windows C drive, and you can see that folder exactly there. This is showing me the folder structure built right into Bridge and looking at it through Bridge instead of having to dig deep into all my folder structure. A lot of times, if I'm going to be editing images, before I start editing images, and I've got Photoshop open down here, I'll just go ahead and open Bridge too. So if you look down here, I have this pinned to my desktop, so Windows users, once we open it, if we right-click on that, we can say, unpin or pin to the task bar so it's always there for me, it's quick access. I click on Bridge, it opens up. I click on Photoshop, it opens up. Now, I can use Bridge to be the gap, or bridge the gap, oh look at that, between my photos and Photoshop. Looking at this, it's not necessarily a cataloging software. It doesn't catalog my images. As a matter of fact, I don't even have to do any importing through this. So if I do a photo shoot, what I end up doing is I end up putting those photos in to a very specific folder, and then I just use Bridge to find that folder on my desktop, or wherever it is that I end up putting my images. It's just a window into the images, and that's the ting to take away from this here, it's a window into your entire file structure, and your folder structure. It's not necessarily a cataloging software, it's not going to make any cataloging decisions for you, all it's going to do is show you exactly what you see on your Windows, or your MAC, file structure in a pretty way. And to do that, we have a couple things up along the top here, just to take a look at how Bridge works. What you're gonna notice in how I operate here with this course, is I take a deep dive into every little thing, talk about those little things, and then move onto the next thing. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take this from the top down, work our way through Bridge. You have the Essentials view which is gonna show you a couple things on the left, a couple things on the right, Publish, Key Words, Metadata, Preview when you're filtering collections, but watch when you go to Filmstrip, everything kind of changes around. Now, this is all a modular setup, so if I were to click on, let's say, this Bridge folder here, 'cause this is the test folder I have for this, if I were to double-click on any one of these folders just to see what's in there, this is gonna be a filmstrip view of all of the images, and I can either click through them or press the right arrow key to navigate through my images and see a preview in front of me. If I were to go to the Essentials view, it's gonna give me just those images, like I would see it probably on my current file structure in Windows. Before we dig too deep into Bridge, and look at what Bridge has to offer, let's go to Edit, and let's go to Preferences, 'cause you can edit the Preferences within Bridge and do a couple different things to make this look different, act different, or interact differently with the images that you're working with in your folder structure. If we go to General, if we look over here, let me go ahead and close this down real quick, if we look over here at Favorites, and then we go to Edit, and then we go to Preferences, and then we go to General, you can see that right here we have, on the left-hand side, under my Favorite Items, it's showing me the libraries that I have on my PC. I can turn that on and off, and watch how it just turns off right away. If I go to my blake, which would be my users, which I typically don't put anything in there anyway, I can just turn that off so I don't see that. If I go to my Documents, I typically don't put any of my pictures in my Documents, so I don't necessarily need to see that, I can turn that off. And then if I go to Desktop, I do put things on my Desktop so I will keep that as a Favorites access, and then maybe turn off Pictures, 'cause I put my pictures in a different folder. And then I'll have This PC there as one of my Favorites as well. So that's basically just a way that I can look at what's happening in the Favorites section, and modify them through the Preferences here. As you go through these Preferences, it gives you a lot of different options for how Bridge is gonna interact with your images. So if I got to something like Metadata, the Metadata that's contained in your file that you take, anytime you take any picture within your camera, there's always going to be Metadata that's applied to that image, no matter what camera it's taken from. Here you can say what Metadata you want it to actually show, because if you click over here on this Metadata block here, that thing can get really convoluted with stuff. So here you can go through and say what you want it to show in that Metadata so it only shows what you really want to see within that Metadata. Key Words, you can look at your key words in a different way so you can actually write your key words so they are hierarchal key words. I don't really worry too much about that, but labels is something that's actually pretty fun. As you're going through, and we'll talk about culling images here in a second, in another segment within this lesson, we can name our own labels for this and this is actually kind of fun, 'cause I get excited when I see a really good picture, so I like that green one there. I can actually add a green label to my image. You can make these labels whatever you want. So if you're the type of person who shoots portraits, landscapes, architecture and has many different images that you shoot, you can label these appropriately, so you can say, maybe this would be your black and white images, and this would be your architecture images, and green, because green is landscape, we'll just say that those will be my landscape images, and you can rename these whatever you want them to. I like green to show up when I find that one picture that I do in a shoot, as I'm going through and looking through my images, and I'm like, oh, that's the one, that's the one. So I'm gonna label this Winner Winner Chicken Dinner. Ha, there we go. So anytime I take that one really good photo, I know that green, when I highlight that green, it's awesome. If I am going through my photos, and this would be one of the things I do when I'm just going through to cull my images, I'll call this one Go Away because maybe I may some bad decisions on that one and I wanna reject it, I want that one to go away. This one would be Maybe Process, and then you can add whatever you want for Review and To Do, but these would be my typical three. I like the red light, yellow light, green light type thing. And then if we go to File Type Associations, this is where you can associate what file types open within Photoshop. I pretty much have mine setup so that all of my image files, no matter that image file is, it's gonna open in Photoshop. I don't want it to open anywhere else because I love Photoshop if you haven't been able to tell so far. (chuckles) One thing you can do in Windows is you can right-click any one of those image files, you can go to the Properties of it, and you can tell that image file, and that file type, what to open with. But if you didn't have access to that, or didn't know how to do that, you could associate your files types, what files open within in Photoshop right here. Let's go ahead and go down to something like Interface. This one's pretty cool. So if we look at the Interface, just like in Photoshop where you can change the Interface within Photoshop, you can also change the Interface within Bridge. So if I want more of a dark interface, I could press that one. If I wanted a light interface, which would be our old Photoshop days. This is what Photoshop looked like long before the days of the cool interfaces here with the dark interfaces, but what I really think is interesting about Bridge is that you don't just have to select one of four things for your color theme. You can actually change, maybe, just the outside, just the interface brightness, and leave the image backdrop back here gray, or you even go black. If you wanted to, you can bring this up too. I like this interface but I also like that background space to be a little bit darker, I can just bring this up and make that a little bit darker. So now I'm kind of getting the same, I'm getting a dark preview behind my images. Makes my images kind of pop out a little bit further so they don't get lost. Accent colors are really cool too, so if we click on this Accent Color, right now it's set to that default yellow color, and that default yellow color, you can see up there at Essentials, but I'm gonna change this, if we go to something like Sapphire, that's pretty nice. Maybe System, or Crystal, and now it's white, you see that? I like something like Sapphire because it's kind of like a CreativeLive blue. Even System looks like a nice little CreativeLive blue. Look at that, pretty cool. And then I'll go ahead and just press okay. You can navigate through all those Preferences and really take a deep dive into those. We could probably spend another 25 minutes just in the Preferences getting the setup.