Lessons

Lesson Info

Adobe Bridge: Metadata Panel

Well this class is in some ways the continuation of a class that we did previously which is photo shopped for photographers the essentials that was a three day course where we covered what I consider to be the absolute essentials where if you didn't know these things you know you that really what you need to concentrate on but any time we teach any kind of class we always have a time limit in that case we had three days in three days to cover everything that photographer's need to use is a short period of time so here what we're doing is taking time out for the things we didn't have a chance to cover during that essentials class so that some of the topics we'll get into a second time and just expand on them because oftentimes what happens is you learn how to do some basic adjustments but there are some images that are much more difficult toe work with and when you get to those images the standard basic ideas might not apply to some of those so in this class we can look at the more diff...

icult images in just the more difficult tasks that we have still things that I considered the essential for photographers is just the things that you don't often get to learn on your first time you get introduced to these concepts so what we're going to be doing is we grind it up in two three days and what we're going to do today is going to start off talking a little bit about organizing your pictures we did that at the beginning of the other classes well, I'm going to use bridge here and I'm gonna show you how you could make it much easier to find your images and just narrow them down no that also you can replace bridge anything you ever seen me do in bridge or in something else called camera raw you could replace those two pieces with another program called light room and I usually do which is a good thing that this class is photo shopped for photographers, so I know that anybody that owns photo shop also owns another program called bridge because it comes with photoshopping when you install photoshopped it installs bridge so I know everybody that's seen the class if you have photoshopped, you got bridge so you can do everything we've done there. But if there's anything that you see me dio and either bridge or in camera no that it could be done in light room instead and so if you own that program then you should be doing those things they're instead you can still use the same general concepts so if there's some new concept I teach you that you haven't used in the past, you just need to find it within light room to use it if you own that product so we're starting off a little bit about organ is organizing our pictures, we're going to move on, then to talking about advanced camera adjustments, which means cameras where I always start, because it's, the only a time when photoshopped, could get all the way to what your camera captured in its raw form, where it hasn't been manipulated anytime the data's been manipulated, there's a lot less to it it's not as pure of information, and you can't get us much out of it. So all of my images start off in came a wrong, and so we're going to get into the parts of camera we didn't have a chance to in the last class, then we're going to get onto what I'll call advanced essentials, which to me there's this group of techniques things like panorama stitching or high dynamic range shooting or time lapse and other things we covered some of those things on the previous class, but we only had so much time. So I want to show you some more specialized techniques there for either when their images that you have issues with that standard techniques won't fix or there's just ways to make things look a lot better that we didn't have time for last time. We're also going to get into difficult selections and masking today that means if you have something where I don't know it's a pet of free animal or something, how do you isolate it from its background? It's not give it a haircut or not have chunks of the old background still sticking to it? Ah, where doesn't have to be something furry harry? You're fuzzy it it could be something with a really nice, crisp edge, nice straight lines and smooth curves like a car, and sometimes simpler techniques don't always deliver the most clean looking and result, so we'll look at some other ways of thinking also cover things like how do you move the background on a tree with all its leaves and branches intact and put a new sky behind it or something like that? But those are the type of things will cover on the first day on the second day, we're going to get into adjustments and there's a small set of adjustments that we didn't get a chance to get into last time that are overly useful, but they're not usually the first things people learned they're the things you learn when you're trying to refine the way you're adjusting your images, we're going, then talk about dealing with challenging adjustments if there's ever some issue would have with adjustment where just the end result has some problem maybe it's doesn't smoothly blend in to its surroundings or maybe have troubles getting the colors look exactly right we'll end up looking at some images related to that ah we're also going to get into working with plug ins programs you can add two photoshopped to extend it so you don't have to use just what's built in uh and we'll end up looking at a lot of little settings that can make a big difference on the third day will talk about compositing which is combining together multiple images into something new we'll talk also about retouching and creative techniques so that's kind of a lot to cover three days so what I want to do is dive in and get started and the first thing I want to do is to show you a few before and afters so if you wouldn't mind taking a look at my screen, I have some images that I just finished shooting in the last two months ah lot of the images I used in this first session will be from the trip that I just finished and I'm just going to show you some before and afters where you'll end up seeing the just immediately the before then the after the before and the after just get an idea of what did the camera capture versus what I ended up with so here is an after in a temple and this is a challenge because there's such a huge brightness range here there's a really bright sky outside and there's really dark interior and to be able to get detail in both is not the easiest thing to do. So when I just pointed my camera there and try to capture it, this is what I ended up getting, but through the techniques we'll talk about today, you learned how to get that instead, let's look at some others here we're at a temple, and this is actually inside of a stone bell shaped thingamajig e that is part of the temple and uh but here's the original there's my end result not a dramatically different necessarily other than in brightness, but I think it's a more refined and result uh here again, it's, before I'm sorry and after and before just doesn't look quite as interesting to me. Colors aren't quite as intense. This is the after this is what the camera gives me after before after before, after before, after before and so on. So you get a sense for how big of a difference there khun b between the after in the before, we just need to learn how to make that transition, uh, to make our images really stand out a lot more than they might have originally, and everybody has a different idea of what images should look like. So that it's hard to say if you like these and results better than the before, they're not everybody's got a different vision, and I'm not going to try to talk into the way I do things. I'm just going to share with you what I do and if you find it to be useful, use it. So with all of those images, I just showed you if you think about how many of them required just one piece of photo shop there's, a plug in to photo shop comes with photo shop it's called adobe camera out of that entire set of images, only one image needed more than camera. The one image that needed more than camera was the first one this one here. So this is the before and this is the after but all of the others we did in one place, one dialogue box and that's. Why you're going to see the entire second session today is devoted to camera, because if we can learn more and more about it, we can finish more and more of our images in it. And so I would say about eighty percent of my images just need one dialog box, which is called adobe camera so will spend a good amount of time in there today. But before we do, we need to cover other things, so let's, talk a little bit about organizing our images and just how we can find things quickly and work with bridge. So this is adobe bridge, we talked about it in the the first three day class, and we're going to get deeper into it today, but just in case you haven't seen that other class, if you own photo shop, you also own bridge. It comes as part of photo shop, and usually when you install photoshopping, installs bridge, and in general, the left side, this is a list of folders, which is the structure of your hard drive, just like is, if you navigated your hard drive on your computer by double clicking on the various icons, and if I just click on the little triangles that are here, it will show me if I have a sub folder inside of another. If I happened to, I can collapse down folders or expand them, then, if I click on a folder in the middle of my screen, I'm going to see a preview of whatever's in that particular folder, and when I want to work with any of these, I click on one in the upper right, I'll see a larger preview that previous only going to be larger if other things in your screen aren't competing for space so if you want to get rid of any of these little side panels that air here double click on their names so in the lower right there's an area called meta data if I double click on the word metadata, I'd collapse it down, making more space for other things and if I still want more space for the preview, move your mouse to the edge of where the preview is. So if you look right over here this edge and just pull it to the left, one of the thing that I'm going to do a lot today is what I'm showing you images I was suddenly get them to fill my screen into accomplish that you do one thing and that is press the space bar space bar takes whatever images you're you're currently viewing it we'll show it to you full screen and if you want to cycle through the other images that are in the same folder, you can use the arrow keys. So if you ever see me doing a little slide show of images like this or when I was showing you the before and after images, all he was doing is I clicked on the first image that I wanted to show you two make it active, hit the space bar to make it fill my screen and then I use the arrow keys to cycle through to the others when I'm done, I can hit the space bar again to get out of that mode or hit the escape key if you if it's easier to remember for you but that's just a few things in case you weren't in the previous class and you need just a little bit of help moving around in bridge but now let's look at things that we didn't have a chance to cover in the last class. First in the lower right, there is a tab called metadata at the moment it's collapsed down where I just see its name in the lower right corner I'm gonna double click on the name any time something has collapsed down so all you can see it's this little tab if you double click on it, it will usually expand it to make it so you can see all that would usually be they're in here. This area called metadata will show me information about my image metadata in general is information about your photo that isn't the photo itself that means your aperture setting you shot with the shutter speed what camera model you shot with the date all those things are examples of metadata and so if we need to look up anything about this, like what day was it shot on? Or what camera was it shot with? The metadata panel is where we can do that in the very top it will show me the f stop that I shot with the shutter speed I also setting and this little plus I believe it's your exposure compensation meaning how far from the default exposure setting will you that's everything it will also tell me the width and height in how many megabytes it is so that's always sitting there up to the top but then below that we have this long list of other things we could see the problem that I have with all of this is where it's just so much that could show you if I click on each one of these and expand them you'll see that it is a ridiculous amount of information that it could display about your image and because of the ridiculous amount that it could display it makes it less useful because you just have so much stuff in here if I scroll through this see how massively long that list is usually there's only four five or six things that I really need to know about my images and I want to show you how to simplify this a little bit to make it so you can concentrate on on ly what you really need to see in that area so if I want to control this first off this area at the top that has thes two rectangles with basic information about your images if for some reason you don't like that you could go to the side menu this just to the right edge of that area and if you click there's a choice in here called show metadata placard if I turned that off then those two little rectangles would disappear now I find those two rectangles to be overly useful so I don't commonly turn that off because that's some of the essential information I usually need know about my pictures but all the stuff it's underneath it's usually of combination of stuff that would be useful for some in completely useless to others so let's learn how we can change what's displayed I'm going to go back to that side menu on the right edge my screen there's just a little icon there to click on to get to it and one of the choices there's preferences if I go and choose preferences, it will bring me to a specific area of bridges preferences that has to do with metadata here's what it brings me too and this is simply a list of all the things that could show up here and I can come in and start turning off check boxes to hide things. For instance, if I don't usually need to know what the bit depth iss is it eight or sixteen bits? A lot of people don't care or the color mode or color profile if I never used notes on my pictures I can hide it I can come in here and hide lots of different information and if there's anything where I don't need the entire category of information, for instance, one of the sections in here I believe is about gps data well, if my camera doesn't capture the location that I shot it out and it doesn't have any gps data there and I don't usually add it, then it's just taking up space that clutters up everything else I could see. So if you look in here there's a checkbox for the entire category, this dark gray one and if I turn it off, it'll hide the entire section. And so what I would suggest you do is come in here and see whatever you think might be useful, and if you don't find it to be useful, turn office, check box if you don't work with audio and video, you can hide that section if you don't work with video, hide it and come in here in di comments for medical imaging. So why do we need to see it? So once you've gone through here in turned off all the stuff you don't need, he never really need to look at then it's going to be much more useful when I do look over there because it's not going to be such a clutter of information that, um, that it's hard to look through so I'm not gonna spend the time to go through there and turn everything off, you know, it's one of those personal things you have to do once and then forget about it, but once I click okay, it might take a moment because now it's changing some things internally and bridge but it's going to make it so that metadata area is much more useful because it's not as cluttered you can just get it down focus too. What do you need? So it might be that you need to know what date the image was captured? You might need to know things like the I s o setting, and if you work with other people's photography, you might need to know stuff about the creator like who's, the copyright holder, that type of thing but it's up to you depends on how you end up working with photo shop whatever you don't need to use whatever you don't feel to be be useful, just go to the side menu in that area, choose preferences and that's where you'll find a list where you could turn off little check boxes. And every time you go to that panel, when you notice one thing that you think you're never going to use just once going your preferences turned off in the more times you do that, the more you'll get this narrow down to just what's useful then there's a set of metadata that I like to apply to my pictures what this meta data will do is it will put a copyright on my picture it will say copyright two thousand fourteen ben wilmore it'll have my contact information in it and if anybody opens it within photo shop it's going to make it so in the title bar very top of the image will be a copyright symbol s o that it's one indication that it's copyrighted image and it will be easy for them to find out who shot that image if they want to contact them and possibly use it and it's just one of those things where my images get out from the internet and way too many areas that or if I share it with a client I want to make sure it least that impose there if they want to be able to get ahold of it. So in order to accomplish this on the side menu of the metadata area there's a choice called create metadata template that just means created template that has pre filled in fields of information I want attached my images so I'm going to create a metadata template now it's going to remember from when I created a template in the past it is going to pick up some information about this actual image because here I can see the key words from this particular picture that type of thing but on the left side you can turn on little check boxes and then type in the text that you'd like to use. So here I can say the creator's me I can put in my address if I'd like this is not my address, you guys, you're like choice. I can send him stuff now, but I could do city states so they'd have my contact information in here. Uh, if you go down a bit, there is right here you can put in a copyright notice really want updated from two thousand nine two thousand fourteen and if yu right here, this check box called copyright status that's what causes copyright symbol to appear in the title bar and photoshopped, which is one way to indicate that it is copyrighted and then the usage terms. Sometimes you can have specific uses here's into terms if you want people to be able to use your image is easily like with attribution where they give you credit just to your images. Get out there! Mohr do a search on google for creative commons creative commons is where they've come up with some standard legal terms that you could have just a basic description of what kind of creative commons license you are licensing these with, and people go look it up on the internet and find out exactly what they could use it for. So anyway, I'm going to do that just train on the check boxes I'd liketo add the main things I want to add or my copyright notice to this and my contact information so they know how to get ahold of me once I've done that in the very top you could give this a name ben don't folks I basically just need your license plate teo track you down like this there would put that in there what's funniest I have a new license plate on my my new vehicle and it says vagabond it's no it's it's pretty easy tio tio yeah narrows down there so anyway once have created meditate a template then if I want to apply it to an image there are some choices on the side menu over where it says metadata remember that's where we found the choice of create metadata template I can also edit my templates here so if I need to update the copyright year once a year, you know when the when the year flips over I can come in here and say I want to edit that one that we just created then you can come in here you have the choice of upend or replace and so upend means add to its already attached to the picture maybe what's already attached to the picture I don't know it has certain information that I find to be useful uh, then I don't want to completely wipe it away, get it off of the image. S o I want to upend it, which means just add to it's already there, or I can choose replacement of data because let's say I added meta data was wrong. My address has changed, the year was wrong and all that kind of stuff, then I could come in here and say, completely replace it. So in this case, I'm going to upend the metadata, and I'm going to choose that template. And now it's taken those particular images, and it's added that information to the files, so when these images air opened, they'll have the copyright symbol on him. And if somebody wants to find out the information, what they can do is when they open the picture, if they get it in photo shop, which I'll do right now, they could go to the file menu and there's a choice called file info, and if they choose file info in here, I could come and see right, there's, his author ben wilmore, and down here it has copyright, and it has. If I look through other things, it would have my address and other things, it looks like I didn't update the year, actually, but therefore, they would if they knew and they were used to working with images, they would know where to look and be able to find my contact info, see if they want to license that from me. So that's one area that I find to be useful is metadata. It all depends what kind of stuff I'm looking for, but if I want to find out like this image here was this shot on a high I s o setting so it might need more noise reduction or where anything else I glance over here to metadata and that's where I can see this was shot with aya so one hundred and sometimes that's useful. For instance, if I have a panorama and I'm thinking something looks weird about this panorama, I might click on one image and then use the arrow keys on my keyboard to cycle through the others and just see if the exposure stayed consistent. Did the f stop and the shutter speed? Were they the same for all the images? Or were they varying if they were varying? It's going to be hard to stitch the panorama together because they vary in brightness if they're consistent? I know I'm doing pretty good and so sometimes that's just useful to refer to.