Lessons

Lesson Info

Sorting Images in Adobe Bridge

We need to learn about a couple keyboard shortcuts because most of our interface is covered up when we're in full screen mode like that and so we'll have to rely on keyboard shortcuts and what I'd like to do is rate these pictures to raid a picture usually and click on it once and at the top of your screen there's a label menu if I click on the label menu you'll find there that you can rate things between zero stars and five stars and the keyboard shortcut for doing so is on the macintosh command zero through five on windows that would be control zero three five and people use ratings and kind of somewhat random ways I try to define it so it's standard method for doing so because the problem is if you go back to a folder of images that you worked on six years ago and you notice star ratings in that folder, how the heck he supposed to know why you started those images? What made this one to stars and this one five was the two star image one that was an out take that you're never suppose...

d to give you a client where it was like one of the good images it's hard to really have it let's have a standard system so I try to have a standard system and here's how I think about it if something has no rating at all it means that it's either ready to be thrown away or I've never thought about rating it. I mean, I just never looked at it. I never went through rating if it has one star, it means something I don't want to throw away, but I shouldn't process it. It's not worth processing it's what I would call it out take it out take is something. Where on ly if I find that I can not get the good looking images to truly be usable, I might go back and look at that or if one of the good looking images needs some retouch gene where I need to remove a building that's over on the right side, I might go to one of those images to grab a tree out of it from the same shoot because goingto have similar lighting and other qualities where could be useful to retouch out a building by covering up with something from one of these images, but this image on its own is not worth processing. The client should never see this picture, but where I'm embarrassed that I shot it, you know, the composition terrible, you know, that kind of thing, so one is keep this image, but ignore it for now, I might go back to it if I absolutely have to, but in general, I'm gonna ignore them now if the image is completely out of focus or it's a picture of the floor my camera accidentally fired that kind of thing I'm going to give it no rating at all those so in the end I'll go back and look at the ones that have no rating at all and those air either one's I forgot to rate or there once that I should throw away because they're out of focus there's something completely bad of him not at all usable so ah one means keep but ignore to me a two means this image has potential but I really need to rescue it through processing meaning this thing needs voter shop in orderto to be schauble tow the client and I hope through processing this could become a good image if that makes sense you're not but you look at you that's got some potential but not as it iss it needs photoshopped too be schauble and then three stars is this is a good picture I can show this to the client it might need some processing might be needed be brightened or whatever but I know this image is going to be workable and those are the only three ratings I used the first time I go through folder is I'm either thinking about keeping ignore rescue this thing or this is good okay, so what I'm going to dio is I'm going to keep my left hand three fingers sitting on the number keys one, two and three because I'm going to be hitting one if it's an out take where I just want to keep it and ignore it I'm gonna hit too if I hope I can rescue it, I'm going to hit three if it's a good image in if I only a short amount of time that I'm going to process us give it the client the other redding's built above three I reserve for after I'm done processing because I don't know which ones are going to be the absolute best until I'm done processing him I figured out did I rescue ones that I thought might be rescue herbal and other things and that's how I personally work? I'm not saying you should I'm just saying it's, good to think through it and try to find something useful if you standardize, then when you go back to folders that air years old and you see two stars and one start, you know what they mean compared to just being iran to meaning where you have to kind of re orient yourself to that folder that make any sense all right, so also I'll describe this a little more depth once we're done with this, but uh I only show three star above images to a client client never sees one or two stars they think I'm a better photographer if they never see one or two stars, they think, wow, this person is good because they don't see the out of focus ones, they don't see the bad compositions, they don't see all that kind of stuff, those I don't share with him, but three or above client sees them, they think they're great. So remember it. Keyboard shortcuts command one for one star command to command three so what I'm going to do is click on the first image hit the space bar, so I'm viewing it full screen. I'm going to keep three of my fingers in my left hand on the number keys one, two and three because those are the ratings are going to give him right now. My right hand. I'm gonna have on the arrow keys, someone keyboard second, quickly cycle through the pictures and then one of my other two fingers who are one of my fingers will be holding on the command key so I can do command one command to and so let's see what we can end up doing here. So this is just my personal take on these images. Everybody has a different idea, you think completely differently about what the ratings should be, but let's go through them. So this one, I'm going to call on out take because it's not supposed be horses running on the beach and it's, just not quite in the category. So I'm going to hit the number one to say, I'm not going to process is going to keep it. Who knows? The client might ask for a picture of this guy, and I don't want to throw it away, so I hit one and then the right roky to go on to the next picture. And so ah, this one just terrible composition, it's just look busy. I'm not gonna process it, but it's something I might not throw away cause I might need some of the waves in the background for retouching to put into something else. So I do a command one to say, I'm not going to process that the sun and everything else to me is not exciting there, so give it a one same there, too busy with the background, too busy with the background that one I could possibly save it, so committed to it means I could rescue it. That one I like better. Uh, if I don't give it to, I'm just going to go through here each one of these and just use my personal opinion on them, uh, to see and these air unprocessed I tried to do it where we'd have some really bad looking images these were taken at sunset where you can easily expose for the sun you can expose for the horse you can try to get the motions blurred you can try it the motion sharps there's lots of really different exposures in here and so now that one I think is a good one because it shows running it has okay composition the horse's legs all right, so I'm going to give that a three to say it's a good shot to say regardless of uh whatever I was thinking I'm going to process that one that one I like the motion in and everything else will give it a three in any way I'll just go through this siri's of images and then I'll show you how this helps us reduce the number of images that we process some of these the legs just don't look ideal that kind of stuff that I'm not going to process them in a lot of the times it has to do with having to check things either the focus I'm not sure about or something else where it looks like it just uh I'm not sure if I can get the detail to come out of the horses that's so black there so that would be a rescue through processing, meaning I graded it to in other times it's like that, that big blob on the on the shore, in the foreground, I don't think I'm going to process that one because of it, I don't like the shape of the legs looks like courses falling over on that, so I'm not going to process that so on, usually this goes by relatively quickly where it doesn't, uh, it always takes longer for some reason, whatever I am talking, I would love to actually jump in real quick. We've been getting a lot of questions about light room. I know people are really thrilled about light room for those of you who don't know what it is like room is actually a stand alone program that is kind of like bridge, just bigger it's got all the function of bridge on dh, then even more you can also edit some of your pictures were not going to be talking about light room in this class. This is a photo shop focused class and bridges actually included with photo shop so that's, why we're talking about ridge right now, so we're not gonna talk about light room. However, ben has covered light room in a previous class called light room mastery here on creative live, which you confined, you can jump in the chat room to find ah link to that, or just searched his name on our on our website, eso, just to let people know we're not going to talk about light room in this class, we're going to be photoshopped, focused, do bridge here for a little while and then jump into a photo shop proper and I should mention that anything I do in bridge you can do and light room is alternative and it's really nice to do it in light room. One of the main differences between bridge and light room is that light room is what I would call a cataloguing program, and what that means is that with bridge, the images have to be actively hooked up to this machine for bridge to show me them, uh, where if I have it on an external hard drive and I disconnect that hard drive there's no way that bridge can show me the pictures there on a hard drive that are not actively connected to my computer light room is a cataloguing program, which means I connect my hard drive to it and it doesn't automatically show what's on my hard drive. I can'tjust navigate everything on my hard drive it on. Lee shows me those things I've told light room to pay attention to. And when I tell light room to pay attention to a folder, it catalogues it, and what that means is it creates little thumbnails and preview images that its stores in keeps so that when I disconnect that hard drive, you can still view the pictures that are on the drive that you left at home even though you don't have the high resolution riel pictures here, lightning would still be able to show him to me, and there are certain things I could still do to those pictures, which is really convenient and so that's one of the big parts that makes light room nice, but if you'd learn anything here when I just pictures about camera raw, everything that I show you about camera applies also the light room because they use the same general engine behind the scenes the same programming code for adjustments. So if there's a slider you find me using camera, the same slaughter will be found in light room and you could simply use it there. So the fact that we're using photo shop here because it's photoshopped class doesn't mean you're not gonna learn about what you could do in light room it's only things I do in bridge where you'd have to look a little bit to see is there's something slightly different? Maybe the keyboard shortcut for rating is slightly different or if there's something similar that I'm using ah wei of renaming all your files, you have to look through the menu to find it, but they'll be similar functionality alright, I've gone through all these images because I remember this is being my first one, but before I go in and show you how to narrow that down, though to how many we process and other things that I think we have a question, I noticed that the majority of the pictures had a one rating and then a few more twos, but very self, very few threes it happens to be in this case, the subject matter any time you have something really quick activity like if you're shooting ah car race or something like that or it's like the tour de france and these bikers are going to come by this, this isn't, you know, year the number of keeper's is going to go down dramatically compared to if you just have a person standing in front of you where you're instructing them what to do and you're capturing when it looks good. And so in this particular case, the subject matter dictated that, um, we're going to have a few really good keepers and so often times, though in a folder, I'm gonna have many more number twos and number threes, so now I'm done going through my ratings because I see the first picture or if you don't remember what the first picture is in the lower left corner it's going to tell you the name of the file and the rating of the image and just if you ever see a rating show up down there you know you've already seen that picture and raided it so you're probably back to the beginning now to get out of this view remember we got into it by hitting the space bar to go to full screen mode you can hit space bar again to get out of it but if you forget the escape key also works like get me out of this view okay escape so now we have images in most of them should have ratings there's a chance that I didn't write one and that means that either I simply missed it I hit the right arrow key to many times says going too quick or it was one that just wasn't worth keeping and therefore I wouldn't rate it now let's look at how we can narrow this down and figure out how really what really needs to be processed so on the left side over we can navigate our hard drive just below that there were area called filter right here I'm gonna double click on that to un collapse that in the first choice under filter is ratings he and each one of these is kind of a category where you can click on this little lot little triangle to expand it to see the choices that are there and then collapse it so you this might look more complex when you look at it with a folder images, and if you want to simplify, you just click on the triangles, collapse them all, but now I can see that out of I think we have ninety seven images. I think a total of sixty four of them aren't even worth processing, just not good compositions or something else about it that I didn't like, but those were once I didn't want to throw white just in case I couldn't rescue the others or just didn't have a good one of that, but we still needed a picture of it. I might need to go back to those we have twenty seven two stars and we have six three stars, so have six good images out of that batch where I know for a fact those are most likely good these I hope I can rescue and so on. Now, if I click on one of these choices, I could look at just the images that are one stars or a click again it from that off, I could look at just the images that are two stars or just the images that are three stars now when I do that, what I would do is end up feeling the images that our three stars thes air supposedly the good ones and when I do I look at him and see are there any that look really, really similar and this one they're running different directions so not really that wants a different person but these two right here don't they look really similar so what? I try to do it so I have two images that look really similar I don't wantto process them from scratch eyes if they were separate images I want to figure out which of those two is better and I want a process only that one and only if something doesn't work out with processing that one I might go back to the second one is like a backup, so what I'm going to do is look at these two images and I'm going to do something known a stacking stacking is where just like with stack of polaroids like, you know old style polaroids, you could stack up a bunch and put the good one on top and what's underneath are somewhat of the out takes of that well, you can do a similar thing here in bridge in bridge you can select more than one image in this case I have this image selected I'll hold the shift key get the one next to it and I could go up to the stacks menu and there's a choice here called group of spac now I always use the keyboard shortcut for it just cause I use it so often, it's almost every day, and the keyboard shortcut for it is command guiana mac control gm windows and just think of it as grouping things. So I want a group these pictures together comanche so if you hate keyboard shortcuts, go up to the menu. If you get used to some of them command, she is not a bad one to know, so I'm gonna type command g watch what happens to those two images when I do that? Do you see how they just one slid underneath the other one? So it looks like a little stack of pictures when you do that there'll be a number in the upper left. That number tells you how many pictures total or in that stack you have as many as you want during the thirty in that stack you want. If you click on the number, it'll expand the stack to show you all the images that are under it. If you click the number again, it'll collapse, the stack expanded, collapsed also, when you do searches and things, usually it ignores the images that air collapsed into a stack, meaning only the top image has paid attention to unless you expand the stack, he expanded, it pays attention to it. Collapse that it doesn't, but I don't know if that's the best image on top there's two of them in there who knows if it's the best one it just happened to be what everyone was first it's in there so let's expand our stack let's click on that first image and I'll hit the space bar to view it. Then I'll use the right arrow key to go to the other one and I'll say, what should these two is better? Well, I think this one's better because it doesn't have that stuff in the foreground and if you look at his tail, his tail's being cut off from the right side, whereas here I've got the full tail, it looks cleaner, so I think this is the better one so hit space bar to get out of it and see what damage is that it happens to be the one that's on the top of the stack, but if it wasn't, what I could do is go to the stacks menu and there's a choice in here that is, I have to click on the other one to see it it's called promote to top of spac and that just means put it on the top of the stack make it the one that I see when this stack has collapsed and I want that to be the best one it happened already be sir is that now I could do that same thing for all the two star rated once all I'm going to do is look through here look for images that looked extremely similar in stack up and then I look through each stack pick the best one and put it on the top of the stack and by doing so I'm only gonna process one of those similar looking images and only if for some reason when I process that one I noticed oops I didn't nail the focus or something like that where it wasn't really usable might I go back to some of the others that are in the stack? Does that make sense to narrow it down? So I'm just going to come in here and look for what looks overly similar thes three shots right here they look overly similar so I clicked on the first one I hold shift I click on the last type command g to group him then this one this one those look similar so I'm going to group looks like here's a run going across they look very similar all the way over to here, so I'm going to group them because I would rather not process all of those as one you know individual pictures where I might spend five minutes on each one processing them plus if they're really similar, they're probably going to be images that could use very similar processing settings and so if I process just one of them there's a way I can copy those settings to the other pictures so if the first one doesn't work out, I don't have to start from scratch from the others I can say grab the settings I applied to the ones on the top of the stack and apply to all the others and then I'll go in and maybe fine tune them if I needed to get that all right, so I think now I got it down to where I have what I would call individual shots in here instead of a serious that are very, very similar makes sense now the only thing I haven't done here is go through and put the best one on top I would usually do that I would click on each one, get the space bar and go through and say out of this serious which one is the best let's just say it was that one and I would go up to the stacks menu and I would say promote to top a stack if that choice is not available, it means it's already on the top I'm not gonna do that right now because it's not the most exciting thing to watch but it makes sense question yeah when you were selecting the stacks, I noticed that every one of them were right next to each other can you select yes, you can it's a great question to you asking god you did uh if you click on one image and hold down the shift key and click on another it selects everything between the one you already had selected and the one you're clicking on now so you get a serious in order if you want them to be out of order instead of holding down the shift key to grab the others you need to hold on the command key and the command key would be controlling windows and by doing so that grabs individual images in either makes them selected or d selects them so yes, I could get a sequence in the images by holding shift then hold on command which does individual ones and say I didn't want that that kind of thing and now if I type command g those would go into a stack and it looks as if it changes the order of them in that this one would move over there to the right and it's just because of our viewing method so yes, you could do that but thanks for asking that because it's something I should have covered all right so now we've narrowed it down so now if I need to process images instead of having a folder of ninety seven pictures where I'm going to randomly go through it go I think this one looks somewhat good I'll spend time on it and then randomly look at something else had more of a system of taking a folder of ninety seven images narrowing it down to five must process images because those were three star above those air good pictures where I know I'm going to spend the time, so I finally have a limited amount of time the clients is where's my pictures I'm going to process those first delivering the client if the clients has not any more than that or you needed a different kind of subject matter, then I might expand what I'm feeling remember I'm over here under filter you khun turn on more than one of these at the time I could click there these air just toggles click it turns it on or off now I'm feeling too and above so if I need a larger range of images, these would be the ones I'm going to process and after I'm done processing the pictures, what I'll do is I will view the ones that are to in three stars you know when I'm done processing them I'm going to possibly change their ratings because remember the way I think about the ratings is one star means keep but ignore I'm not going to process those those air just in case I need him for something the two star means rescue this if possible well if it wasn't rescued then it's going to stay astute to star maybe I'll figure out how to get better at photo shop or I'll hire specialists, and they can, you know, fix that image, but if it didn't get improved through processing it's not going to get re rated then, but a three star means it's a good image, it means it's worthy of showing a client. But then where does foreign five stars come in? Well, I use four stars for the standout images in this particular shoot. What that means is if I'm gonna have a portfolio called beat, shoot, these are the ones they're going to go in my portfolio that I'm gonna be proud of five stars I reserve for standout images that would stand alone, they don't have to relate to this particular shoot. If I want to show a client all of my best pictures, regardless of their subject matter, they're only five star images, so four stars have to do with that subject manner five star means this is so good, it doesn't even matter if we're talking about shooting horses on the beach and we're just talking about me in general, this is one worthy of showing. Does that make any sense? If I do that consistently, then I can go back to my hard drive if somebody says I need a picture of asia, that is your best work. Well, I'm going to go and go whatever folders air for asia I'm going to view five stars and hope there's something there if there's not I'm going to go down to four stars hope there's something there and if not that I'm going to get out to three stars you know that kind of thing or if I'm going to do a talk on a certain subject matter, I'm going to click on the folder for that subject matter I'm going to go to five stars see how many I got well, how long's my talk supposed to be we've got five minutes so is there enough pictures for a five minute talk if not, I'm going to add in before star ones I got an hour talk that's not enough image I'm gonna add in the three star ones but I'm never gonna add anything below three stars because those the ones no one else ever sees that's how I think about it if you keep it consistent I find it helpful rest from transformed photo and one other person also voted for this uh actually before I ask the question I'll let people know that you can be asking questions for ben and I will do my best to ask them as we go through the course if you look top right corner of the page you will see there's an ask a button kind of right above the video player to cook that will open up a new window you'll see a box where you can enter the question and a list of all the other questions that everyone else has asked what I would ask you to do is go through scroll through some of those questions and see if somebody else has asked something similar to yours before asking your own you can also vote for those questions by clicking the blue arrow. What that does is tell me that other people also want to know the answer that question so that I can ask the questions that help the most people so this question from transformed photo and one other person also want to know the answer to it can you add a picture to your stacks later or is it only a one time thing? Yes, you can add a picture to your stacks later you can either drag it on top of the stack just click on an image dragon right on top where if you select the stack itself and the other image you should be able to also but yes, you can you can also get images out of a stack if I accidentally added one let's say in this particular case I didn't want this particular image I click on it go to the stacks menu and you will find a choice you're un group from stack that means pull this thing out of that stack and so now it's no longer part of that stack so just explore the choices that are under the stacks menu because that's all the stuff you could do a stax if something's great out it probably means that you need more than one picture selected because you can't put one invention a stack or you need tohave a stack that already existing and have it active if anything's great out but that's what those are are for also if you look really close at a stack you see first off we have the number up in the corner and you don't always feel like clicking on the number and expanding it to see ah everything that's in there so when you mouse over a stack there's actually a little slider bar up here and if you grab it and drag you can actually cycle through them right there so sometimes it could be a client that asked well, did you get one where the whatever they call that mallet like thing they have in their hand when it was way up like this you know or something? You know? I don't know and so instead of expanding out, you might just grab that and kind of cycle through it like did you actually get it when they had in the down position and you can quickly go through and see that or there's even a play button that'll give you a little you know, kind of slide show. All right, so I showed you how I like to edit down the chute, and I'd do the same thing from using light room in light room. You still have the rating system in there. You still have stacks, uh, all that kind of stuff. So if your light room user it's just a matter of looking at the interface to see where are the choices for working with stacks within light room, and you get to use the same concepts and just remember, over on the left side, this is where we had our filtering, and this is where we could turn on or off. Uh, how many images were viewing?