Skip to main content

Adobe Bridge: Keywords and Filter Panel

Lesson 2 from: Adobe Photoshop for Photographers: Beyond the Basics

Ben Willmore

Adobe Bridge: Keywords and Filter Panel

Lesson 2 from: Adobe Photoshop for Photographers: Beyond the Basics

Ben Willmore

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

2. Adobe Bridge: Keywords and Filter Panel

Lesson Info

Adobe Bridge: Keywords and Filter Panel

if I want to be able to find images in the future very quickly, then I end up using keywords in with keywords. Key words there another part of metadata, which is information that's not actually part of your image, but keywords air things that you can easily search for in so in the keywords. What I'll usually do is I will end up putting the location that I shot. This is Bandar Seri Begawan. That's where I waas, which is part of Burn I. So I could very quickly search for those I can set up meditated our keyword templates. So if I use once all the time, I might come in here and click on one of these places. And if it was shot at a temple, which all of these were, I could select these. And here I have a key word for Temple, and these are Asian temples. So I'll turn that on as well. So now, if ever want to find these images, there's a very quick place I can go to where I could do a search. And if I just typed in temple, I would see all the Thean Mages that I've take temple. And if I see too...

many of them because I've been to a lot of temples, I could also add to my search the word Asian so it wouldn't be temples from other parts of the world, and I can narrow it down. So let's look a little bit more about how you create and apply keywords and also how we can search for them. So here I have Comodo dragons. He's air like the largest lizard like things you you'll find pretty huge. Uh, and I want to be able to find them very easily. So what I'm gonna do here, select both of these images? And then on the right side, there's an area where I can create new things. If I go to the right side, you see new keyword. If it's something I want to be able to use quite frequently, I can do that. And I'm just going to say Dragon now they're dragons all over in different parts of my images because in Asia a lot of the temples have dragons on them, and so I might want to be able to tell the difference between ah dragon that's just depicted on a temple and what's known as a comodo dragon. And so, in this case, I'm just going to check this little check box to turn on Dragon. And if I want to be able to find these images, all have to do a search for the word dragon. But when I do, I might also find a bunch of temples that if they're marked with dragon because they have dragons depicted on them, So then I would be able to further narrow my search by putting in the word Kimoto to the search. And I'd be able to find just these something. I have another one here I'll go this side menu say new keyword in this one spider and these are things that I'm going when I go to the side menu and say new keyword, they're going to stay up here so I can use them in the future. What you end up doing is you end up creating a list of standard keywords that you like to use once that are easy for you to use universally between a bunch of different images and the more you work on a keyword list, their standardized the easier it is to find various things. And so I want to show you a special set of keywords where somebody else spent all the time to narrow things down and I'll show you how to apply them. But before I do that, let me first show you how to create sub keywords. If you look, do you see here? There's like a category of keywords which would be temple and then below. It is a subcategory, which would be Asian, just like in here. I could have a subcategory or a main category of Asia and then various countries within Asia as sub categories. So what you can do is if you click on one of these keywords, you go to the side menu is a choice called new sub keyword. If I choose that now you see, the next keyword I'm creating is indented from the previous one. And so that means that it is, you know, below are part of this, and so I can type in. So now I can come into my images again. Grab those two images, click here and I can have it apply both of those keywords. This city No, there's a preference because with the preference. It really depends on the preference setting house is gonna be applied. You can set it up. So when you click on this, it would only apply that specific keyword or with a different preference. When you click on this, it would automatically apply the sub keywords. So let's go see where that is. I'm gonna go into my preferences preferences air found into the bridge menu on a Macintosh on Windows. Instead, they're gonna be under the edit menu, and there's simply a category of preferences on the left side called keywords. And right here it's ask, how are you going to do things? Are you going to automatically apply parent keywords? And what that means is, when I click on this sub keyword here, it would automatically turn on this check box. Or another way you could do it is turn that off and instead write them with a little separator so the actual keyword will be dragon and then this separator and then the sub keyword, I'm gonna make it up here on the top click. OK, and now let's see what happens when I apply a keyword that has one of those first I'm gonna come in here and find an image that might be appropriate Shouldn't be too hard to find a temple in all Come in here. And when I apply Asian, watch what happens to Temple See how it's automatically applied. So the preference that says automatically apply that he was going to Teoh make this work out if I go back to my preferences. If this check box up here was not turned on, then when I clicked on that choice called Asian, the choice called Temple would not be applied. So you need that to be turned on in order to make it automatically apply the higher levels. So now I show you how you could really get crazy with keywords and make it very easy to find images and just drill down to them. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to the side menu and there's a choice within the side menu called Import. You can have a text file that contains a bunch of words that are your keywords. And if you choose import and feed it that text file, it will take all the text within the file and put them in here. There are people that have spent a tremendous amount of time doing that. The person by the name of Seth Resnick and I want to show you what one of hiss keyword templates look like. Take me just a moment. Find the little text file. This is a file that you can purchase. The website you purchase it on is D 65 dot com and let's see what you get. If you were to purchase it, I'm gonna go to the side menu of the keywords area. I'm gonna choose Import, and I'm gonna import Seth set of keywords. Now here it shows me the contents of the text file, and it shows me all those words that he's put in, and he's organized these words under different categories to make it so It's very easy to fine things. So I'm gonna click open and let's see what happens now to our keywords area. Look at what he's got here. So now we have animals. And if I drill drill down into animals, we can come in and say, Was it a bird of fish? Reptile? Let's say it was a mammal then. What kind of mammal is it? Corn of Carnivore can even say that. Ah, big cat. What kind of big cat? Now, this looks to be overly complex, like it would take a lot of time to implement, but it's actually rather simple. Let's just imagine that what was in this photograph was a lion. I know it's not, but let's say it. Waas if I had all these things collapsed down. So I'm not going to spend my time trying to navigate through all those things to find the keyboard key word I want to attach instead of just click on this picture in In the bottom down here. Do you see a little search field? I'm just gonna click there and I'm gonna type Lyon. Do you see how quickly it got me to the keyword called lion? But when I apply it and I click here, look at the key words that it applied. Now, just with a single click, I'll be able to find this image by searching for the word animal by searching for the word Manimal carnival. Are can you say that big cat or lion to see how if you set up a keyword lists and you put it in there with different levels like that. Tell it to apply the parent levels to it, you can make it so with a single click, you can very easily just come down here. Click on your image hit temple and look what it's already applied. It's already applied under building religious buildings and all that type of stuff. So if I do mosques and everything else since someone, my name is Seth Resnick spent a lot of time setting this up and really thinking through this because if you ever sell your images with stock photography sites, that's one avenue where you can make money on your images. The only way they're gonna be able to find your images is through keywords. They go on the website. They see I need a picture of a church so they type in church. But not everybody thinks the same way. They might not have typed in the word church they might have typed in religious building and in this way, by setting up a preset ah set of keywords, weaken very quickly get things assigned by really working this out, so you can either spend the time to set up your own list. of keywords in apply them or you can end up purchasing someone else is the one that I find to be the most extensive, although I haven't done overly extensive research is from a website called D the person who runs that website is Seth Resnick, and he has this list when you get there, just so you're aware the keywords will say that there for light room. But all it is is a text file that works both with light room and with bridge, and I find it to be very nice so that I can very quickly do you think so? If I end up taking something with rain, it already has tagged water. It's already tagged. Whether it's already tagged other things in. It's really nice. So let's say we've applied some keywords Then how are we gonna end up finding our images very quickly based on those keywords? Well, let's get some applied first here. These are all boats, so I'm gonna come over here. I find it in here, collapses down a little bit, and let's see if we can find what's another word for boat. I know it's in here Well, I'm gonna fight, but and we can come in here, apply water. And if we end up doing this, if we want to see what um, everything is tagged with what I can do is come in in the lower left. There's an area called Filter. And if I go to the area called Filter, this is going to say Narrow down what I'm currently showing you. And if I look in here, one of the areas shown is keywords, and so do you see what's in here? What it's doing right now is it's analyzing this particular folder, and it's showing me all the key words that have been applied to the pictures that are within it. And I'm gonna come in here then and just click on one of these. Click on Opera House. I see the one picture that has that keyword. I click again so I no longer see that click on Sydney and all these eight images air from Sydney. There's 12 from Australia because not all of them were in Sydney. I also went to Darwin and went two cans. That's a myself. I want to find a picture of bat. Well, there's the one picture of that within this folder, it's just a matter of applying those keywords ahead of time now, To be honest, I'm used to applying these Kerry words within light room because I've were largely replaced, um, bridge and came a wrong with light room, and therefore I'm not used to this particular interface. Eso if you look at me being a little bit different with it, that's why, in light room, you can also apply keywords in order to search for the keywords at the very top of your screen, right above the thumbnails. It's usually a little bar you can click on, and there's a choice called text. If you tap there, you could search your entire photo library for the word bat or the word temple or whatever it would show you every photo you have that's ever been tagged with that. And so in here, you can see how quickly I can find a picture of a kangaroo in Australia. Uh, we're here. I can show a picture taken in a in a city called cans and qualities. I got two shots right there. I love this one. It looks like he's playing a bass. I want to do a little retouching to put a base in his arms. All right, but as you say, I'm used to doing that within light room, which is where I organized most of my pictures. But you can do it either in light room or here in bridge. Let's look at a few of the other areas on the left side, so filter allows you to narrow down the images that you're currently viewing in here, and some of the things that you can glean through that filter panel our ratings. You can rate your images by clicking on an image, and then right below it are little dots. If you click on those dots, you can add one through five stars, where you can go up to the label menu and right here you can apply the ratings. You also see keyboard shortcuts listed their command one through five toe. Apply those ratings if you don't like going to the menu all the time. So often times when I'm trying to narrow down the number of images I want to use for a slide show or something, all end up going through my pictures in rating them. And then right here is one place where I can narrow them down. I can come in here and say How many images have one star? Uh, I want both one and two stars as well as three. And if I want to narrow down the number of images I used for maybe a slide show or something I might limit myself to once that I've had high ratings on. So that's one thing I can do, which is quite nice, have also mentioned keywords. But other things that I can do. Let's say that I have a folder of 1000 images in sometime within the last week. I know I process some, but I don't remember which ones. Well, if I go here to date modified, it will show me the dates that I've changed all these files. And so if it's something where I know I've worked out in the last week well, right here to list all the dates and I will click on whichever one is the newest date, and I can quickly find those. If you want to grab him from more than one day, just continue clicking and you can add more and more to what you're viewing sometimes, uh, let's say magazine calls. They want something for the cover of the magazine. I know that's got to be a vertical. And so here I can choose the orientation. I want things that are in portrait orientation. So the verticals, then I might further drill down to the ones that are high rated. Oh, I got one. Well, actually, there, um, there was the one that was rated three stars was not a portrait Orientation one. That's why I didn't see anything. But it would be more easy for me to drill down to that other things here. I also speed ratings. I will often go to this area after shooting to just see Did I use any ridiculous I S O settings? Because the higher the I also setting is in your camera, the more noise you get. And so the more I might have to think about noise reduction when it comes to these images. So I come down here. These were shot at I also 1600 so I might want to look closely at them. Look at him at 100% view, see if they need noise reduction. Same with ones that were shot it at 12. 50. The others should be fine because my camera does find when I'm below 1000 for I s O, I might also come to exposure time and see if there's any really slow exposures. Because there those things that I might need to look for motion blur to see. Yet are they usable or not? Aperture value. Maybe I want to look for something that has a lot of focus background. Well, the higher the f stop number, the more the background is gonna also be in focus. So here, when I'm shooting F 2.8, that's usually when I'm trying to get the background to be soft. It will be very easy to find those. Maybe. I think f 45 is also enough to get a slightly out of focus background. But Aiken, drill that down. You could also use this to figure out what lens should I buy next? How the heck do you figure that out? We'll just looking here at the choice called lens? What lens did I use the most? Right there, I can tell you is a 24 to 70 So I click there. I can see all the types of images that I create with that type of a lens, and then I could come in here. And there's a choice called focal length. Well, I can say What's my most common length? Is it at the end of that zoom range? You know, if it's a 24 to 70 I shoot a lot of 70 right, which means I might wanna lends. That goes longer than that, my next lens. Maybe it should be a 72 100 you know, if I don't already have it. So it's a lot of interesting information you can glean and really narrow down your pictures under this area called Filter. One other thing I find to be overly useful is this area called camera and custom settings means images that I've already adjusted. Let's say, have a folder that contains both adjusted and unadjusted images. If I come over here and choose custom settings, what custom settings means is it does not conform to a preset or the defaults. It's something where I've moved the settings and customized them. I could choose that, and then let's just say only three images showed up. These three. I could select those three and then turn off that check box so I'm no longer only viewing the ones that have custom settings. Then, under the think it's the Edit menu, there's a choice called invert selection, which means give me all the other the opposite of that. Instead of having those three images I originally have selected, show me all the others. So then these would be the images that I haven't processed. So what would I do there again? Over here in the lower left came a raw I would click on custom settings, and that would show me all of the images that have already been processed. I've customized settings. I select those images, and then I turn off this check box on scene Every image that's in that folder, I'd still have the images that have already been processed. Selected, though I go to the edit menu in shoes, invert selection, and now I have a selection of all the images that haven't been processed yet, so you can see how this area, called filter, could be overly useful. One last thing about it is the problem with this area. is if I come in here intelligent, wanna look for one star images and then I switch with folder. I'm viewing and I switched to a different one. It automatically turns off those check boxes. So then I'd have to come back down here and say, you know, with one of these others What do I want to filter by? Well, if I want it so it stays consistent. So I come in here to camera and I say, I want to see all the images that are un cropped, and I want to be able to now switch through all my folders and always see the images that are un cropped. All I need to do is in the lower left. There's something that looks like a little pin. If I turn it on, it means make that sticky so it stays on when I switch between folders. So now I go to Vietnam, and these are all the images that have not been cropped. Go to Singapore. Here's the images that have not been cropped and so on. If I wanted to get rid of that, you can click the no symbol that is to the right, right here and that will clear it off so that that little pin is no longer turned on. One other thing that I find to be useful with that ISS that Onley show with some of these folders will take me a moment. Find one that will. Right here there's also a choice called file type and with file type I confined to have JPEG files in their raw files, tiff files and so on. One of the things I find useful is I use the tiff file format whenever I stitch a panorama. It won't be a raw filing, Maura. The end result will be some other file formats. And also when I do HDR so I can click on this thing called Tiff image, and I'm probably gonna find either HDR pictures or panoramas because I can't save those back into a raw file. I have to save it in a different file format and so I can very quickly usually locate those. Let's see if I did any panoramas in Singapore. Yeah, those air stitched. All right, so we have keywords, which is where we can add text to picture text that you might want to search on later. If you want to find images that have those keywords applied, we go to the filter area when we're looking at a folder, and right here is the choice called keywords Tap. There it will show you the key words that have been applied. Click on it. It will narrow down what you're looking at. Two. Just those key wording one's weaken further, narrow it down, then to say, All right. Also, I want ones that were rated one star or two stars. If there weren't so question ready for a couple questions? Yes, awesome. Let's start with Melissa and then we'll go to the Internet. Um, I have a few questions. First of all, when you add a keyword to these pictures, is it saving it in the background automatically? Yes, in general, it ISS and well, I'm used to doing in light room, and it's doing in the background. In fact, if I quit light room before it's done writing it to all the files that will tell me that and won't let me quit it. And when I apply a keyword to a file, it's usually in the file itself so that if I later on import this in the light room where I applied it. Enbridge. Now I'm going to light room. It's actually going to still be in the file. In fact, the keywords that you see applied to these that have the locations were all applied within light room. That's where I I usually manage my pictures and I can still see them here in bridge. That answered my second question. That was eyes it Is that the same for star ratings? Will it save that in the metadata as well? It should. I believe it does where it should transfer between because a lot of these were also starred within labour. And then last question, I really liked the the parent folders with the keywords. Is that something that light room does? Because you could do that light room as well E class. Sometimes you want to organize your keywords where you have a container A, like countries is the container and then within that is U S. A Mexico, you know, whatever, but you don't want to actually have the word countries attached to your picture. If you put one of when you create a keyword, if you put it in brackets. You know the square brackets. It means this is just a container. For key words, it's not actually a keyword itself, so it doesn't get automatically applied when you click on one of its Children s O. Therefore, if you want to do that, it could be called clients, and it's got the brackets around it. And then within that sub keywords are the various clients. Does that make sense? Yes. Yeah, and that's what you'll see. If I look in the here on these keywords is you'll see some of these will have brackets around them like here. Animals action, you know, actually want the word action attached to the picture. But within their you have all these other choices that you just want to organize under kind of a topic of action, even though that wouldn't be applied. But you see the little brackets. That means this isn't actually a key word. It's just a container for key words. Okay, there's keywords, and there's sub keywords. Yeah, sub keyword is just one, like when I had Temple and then the word Asia, like an Asian temple or something similar to that. So if depending on your preference When you click on a sub keyword, it would automatically apply the parent keyword. You get in both with just about brick, and that's what was cool when I clicked on Lion. It all automatically applied Animal, carnivore, cat and all those other kinds of things just to make it easier to search. Especially if you end up selling things. A stock photography. How are they delineated? Delineated? I'd actually have to look within the file. I okay. It's not just I was just a random Bush. If it's Commons or what you look on the metadata area, you'll see also, uh, some of them Aziz. Well, actually, you could see at the top of the key words. Okay, so from the Internet from Janice E. Will Resnick's list replaced the key words we already have. No, it won't. It will add to them. Okay, cools you can. There is a choice on the side menu. I think we see here. Where was it? On keywords. There is a choice called import, which is what I used. OK, it should really be called upend. Yeah, And then there's a choice called clear and import, which should be called replace and That's what these two are. So before I want a demo here, you know, it's like, how do I get all these keywords out of here? Well, I created a little text file. That's just one word. And I come over here and say, clear and import, cause there's no choice of just clear There's probably a way Sure there is on. And I could come in here and find that little file. Just got one word in it. No keywords right there. The text file. It's got the word action in it. Click open, and now I just cleared it out. So the only key words I'm seeing now are ones that are applied to this image. And then what was in that text file? So you just go to the side menu. If you choose, import is gonna add to what you already have. If you choose clear an import, it would replace what you already have. Okay, cool. And I might have missed it showing selecting multiple photographs and applying keywords. Just select multiple photographs like this school and then go to your keyword list. Tap on the key word. It will apply to multiple

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Companion Guide
Working Files
Practice Images

Ratings and Reviews

Olga
 

The best investment I've made to improve my PS skills. Mr. Willmore is a skillful lecturer. English is my second language and I appreciate the clarity of his voice and the fact that he repeats several times what he's doing or what he did. It is great for note taking as well as for practicing. Just an Excellent workshop! Thanks Mr. Willmore!

a Creativelive Student
 

I absolutely love Ben Willmore's teaching style. He is clear and thorough. This class has a wealth of good info so I had to purchase this course. Thanks Ben and Creative Live!!! PS, Don't forget to forward the PDF. I am waiting patiently.

a Creativelive Student
 

Outstanding!!! I've been interested and have practised photography since I was Thirteen. Transitioning from film to digital. Ben's course taught me so much I had to purchase it! There was just too much information he passes on. As an instructor, Ben is very clear, concise and thorough. Ben makes sure you understand the concepts; what a great educator! Thanks Creative Live!!!!! Thanks Ben!

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES