Lessons

Lesson Info

Adobe Bridge: Basic Navigation

well we got three days here for photo shopped for photographers the essentials now the reason why there's a little tag on the end of the essentials is actually two classes planned for this there's going to be a class called the essentials and then there'll be another class in april which will be three days long and it will be beyond the basics so the two put together is what I consider to be the whole class but just so you know kind of the difference between the two and how I thought about it isthe I thought that I wanted to create two classes that really match up perfectly together so that if you were taken as a whole you got extremely rounded knowledge but there are some things where if you're not familiar with some of the basic really fundamental things that you really can't handle getting into the more advanced and difficult stuff so the more advanced and difficult stuff is in the second class it doesn't mean we're not going to do things that a lot of average photo shop users would...

n't consider to be advanced in this class is just that the really advanced stuff that's you know crazy will be in the other class but just because anything might be advanced everything that doesn't mean it would be difficult to understand I've been teaching photo shop now for twenty years and I've taught over a hundred thousand people in person don't doesn't count that does not include the internet and video and all that kind of stuff so because of that it makes it so on use to describing things by trying to relate them to what you already know and I find that if I really know what you already know it feels more obvious to you feels just more natural to understand it and so it's going to try to dio so regardless if it's this three day class or the next set of three regardless of how technical I tried to get into areas I'm going to try to always related to something you know so that it really makes sense to you eso in general this class is the fundamentals this is the stuff that khun radically make your images look better and is absolutely essential where if you don't know this stuff your photos do not look all that good and then the next class is one that the other three day classes where you learnt all the small little refinements and all the really difficult stuff where if you run into let's say retouching that normal retouching just does not deal with it you know you'll learn it there if you want to learn the things that refine your images so they just get a little bit better at a level that you rarely see and other images that's where you're going to learn that so the two put together is really going to be a nice marriage of two classes to see where now I'd mentioned that I'm going to be using the newest version of photoshopped photoshopped cc but the majority of what we use is available in other versions and I'll try to mention whenever you need photo shop cc to do something that im working on a majority of the time you can use just about any version so what I'd like to start with yes I'm just going to show you a slide show of some recent images and you'll just get a sense for some of what I shoot this is not a very varied ah siri's of photographs for instance I see no humans in them I do take photos people in other things but it just give you some sense of some of my image is so I'm going to start up a little slide show here's fall color from this fall and if I come through here just look at general feeling for these and then once you see these I'm going to show you the before and afters so you'll see what it looked like when it came out of the camera and that's when you'll get a sense for how much of what you're seeing here came from photo shop versus what came from my camera because I think of my camera is just capturing raw material I think of what comes out of it is often subpar not great looking stuff that I need to transform and make into something dramatically better than what I might have started with so these are some recent ones just about time with that siri's that one was an old one but and now let's look at the before and afters so you can see what the camera captured and just see nose sometimes I purposely make it so the image does not look good in the camera because there's sometimes a way of capturing the image where to look better when you're done digitally processing it but it might not look the best in the camera and that's the kind of thing we'll talk about in the second series of classes because we first need to get the fundamentals out of the way before we can talk about those little bitty refinements and that's part of it so some of these you might think well that original looks pretty bad and that's because I purposefully did something to make it so I can get a better digital result so let's take a look at before and afters so this would be the in capture in camera capture and here's the end result that one's a relatively subtle transformation uh this one and we're going to be learning all this stuff pretty much in this class with a few exceptions but it just gives you a sense what the camera get what did we end up with you getting a sense for the cameras sometimes looks kind of dull afterwards sometimes looks a little better and everybody has a different idea of what their photos should look like some of you might even prefer the before version on a few of these that kind of stuff everybody has their own style so that it's up to you what you want your images to look like I'm not going to dictate what I thinkyou're images should look like this is just how I like mine to look now when you think about all those images I just showed you there's really two parts of photo shop we're going to be working with we're going to start off always in a plug in for photo shop that's called adobe camera wrong and if you happen to shoot in raw file format which there are some advantages doing then that's where you're going to be sent automatically when you're open your images if you shoot j pegs or you work with images from other people that might be like let's say tiff files or some other file format it wouldn't automatically send you there but I'll I suggest that you go there anyway there's a certain amount we can do within camera and whenever we need to go beyond its capabilities we need to head into the main area of photo shop so if you think about the put foreign after us I just showed you thinking your head how many you think required photoshopped versus the ones that could be handled in a plug in that's called adobe camera where two single dialogue box with a bunch of sliders so if you think about all the images we just went through I'll tell you that only two of them involve photo shop and this one obviously because look at the complex retouching between the before and the after I removed a whole bunch of stuff in the background added texture to it and if he actually looked at this close which is not a high res version this is actually looks like paint if you look at it like I actually painted it with paint strokes you can see a little hint of that on the chair if you look close enough but that one required photo shop and the only other one that needed photo shop was this one but all the other ones were done purely in adobe camera wrong and so that's where we're going to start when we're talking about our adjustments is camera but before we get into adjustments here's what we're going to do overall over the next three days and you see how we're going to progress through adobe camera in the photo so today I'm going to start off talking about organizing your photos because if you just haven't coming off camera they're not going to be all that that great we're going to deal with just how do I think about organizing navigating doing that kind of stuff we got to get it out of the way so we'll cover it at the beginning then we're going to get into camera wrong I'll first talk about adjustments that affect the entire image and we'll spend a good amount of time so you know how to fix just about any kind of image he run into if it's over exposed underexposed lacking contrast too much contrast color issues anything that is the major problem with your image you'll learn how to make a pretty big fix those images using a plugging called adobe camera raw that comes with photo shop then after talking about the adjustments that affect the entire image will get into working on isolated areas that picture so if I want on ly effect once somebody's left eyeball or only affect the sky or something like that we'll learn how still in camera raw we can work on isolated areas and refine our images muchmore once we're done with that will get out of camera and talk about some essentials for photo shop there are some essential concepts that if you don't know them really goingto make it to your image is technically might not be their best so we'll talk about things like color spaces resolution in other things that are essential file formats that kind of stuff kid out of the way so that we can really dive deeper in for the rest of the class tomorrow we're going to talk about photographers essentials at the beginning and what I think of when I think of photographers essentials are features within photoshopped that air designed largely forced photographers uh general so that means things like stitching panoramas we're doing what's called hdr which is where you take multiple exposures that vary in brightness combine them together into a single image that kind of thing is what will start the day with and then we're going to progress into adjustments so we'll talk about adjustments in adobe kamerad today but there are some adjustments that you just can't do there so you have to do min photoshopped will separate that into two sections one will be tonal adjustments in any time I mention tonal adjustments it means anything it doesn't affect the color so brightness contrast that kind of stuff then after that we'll talk about color adjustments and when I go through that I'm not going to script described everything that's in photo shop instead my perspective will be I've used photo shopped for twenty years and there are some adjustments that I either never used or rarely use and we're going to ignore those and I'll tell you why I ignored and I'll tell you why I use the tools that I do and why I think you should spend your time learning specifically those because I think they're going to be the absolute most effective they're not always the easiest tools to use but if you have help then there will be just fine us for us how easy they are it's just not always easy to learn your own that's why we're here after that at the end of the day tomorrow we'll talk about adjustment layers and so we can isolate areas very intricately and really be able to refine our images I'll show you how I direct the viewers I threw my image so that I try to control where they look first where they look next what do they ignore all that kind of stuff through adjustment on the final day we'll get into working with layers retouching creative treatments and then we'll end with some start to finish examples where we use everything we covered over the full three days so you can get more of a sense of the workflow what do I do first second third and why so that makes sense as faras the overall design of thes three days but we got to start somewhere so I'm going to start with organizing your images and we're going to do that in something known as adobe bridge if you're not familiar with adobe bridge by chance if you own photoshopped you own bridge if you installed fighter shop you probably installed bridge even if you didn't know it and so bridge is what we used to just view our images as thumbnails and organize them I'm not going to cover every single detail that's in here because remember we have two three day classes gotta have something left over for the other class so I'm gonna ignore anything that would take way too much time or be too granular and detail and try to cover the essential parts right now s o we have a foundation for that I should also mention that there's an alternative to bridge which is a great alternative that I do suggest you using which is adobe light room light room is usually actually a separate purchase from photo shop but adobe had a special deal on and I'm not sure if it's still going on it might be through part of february where you could get photoshopped in light room as a package where you pay I think it's nine dollars and ninety nine cents or something a month and you get access to both it was a short time offer though I think they might have extended it and might go through part of february but I don't not absolutely sure of the last time I searched though I know it went beyond the original deadline so do a google search to find out so anyway anything that I do in bridge or in adobe camera those two areas you could do in light room instead all the sliders that you see me moving around with in camera wrong are available in light room so if I'm talking about the highlights slider and camera and you own light room just being like removing the exact same slider the techniques that I teach will equally apply there and so light room is a great alternative to bridge and came a raw I do suggest you use it the advantage mainly is it khun catalogue your photographs where even if I don't have the hard drive attached that contains my pictures I can still browsing my pictures I can still put them into slide shows organize them in many ways and all that is just that I can't print them oftentimes I can't adjust them but there are some new features that would even allow that himself but let's jump in let's get started so first thing is this is what bridge looks like when you first launch it I mean it configure it more how I like it to be and give you an overview of how I think about it for some of you use bridge a whole bunch in the past so you'll be a little bit bored with a few of the features here but you'll probably also notice that there's a few things that you don't use in here that you're gonna learn little bitty things that will make a big difference so let's jump in and take a look oh first when you launch bridge is what it looks like and in the upper left you'll find an area called folders in an area called favorites and that's where you browse your hard drive this should be a literal structure of your hard drive here so you can start from the desktop and open that up and see what's located on your desktop or you can start from your computer if you open up your computer you usually have the name of your hard drive and you will have things like your user name and stuff you can drill down justus if you were double clicking on your hard drive and navigating it to do that I've already created some folders in those folders air sitting on my desktop those are the ones I'm going to be using and so I'll be using this a little structure that's right here and with this you just click on the little triangle to expand click on it again to collapse and we can go into various folders when I click on the name of a folder will see its contents over here on the right as little thumbnails and I can also double click on folders within that to navigate now if there's folders and I need to get to quite frequently like I have a folder of images that he used for seminars and it's not just sitting on my desktop where I can get to it instantly instead it's buried a little bit in my hard drive yet but I need to access it all the time and so what I am doing this I save favorites if I go to my favorites tab you will find that there are usually some extra favorites here but I reset my preferences right before we started so my normal favorites aren't there these are the ones that come with photo shop so I can get into my desktop my documents and so on let's save some things into that area s so what I can do is navigating my hard drive to wherever the folder is that I'd usually use and so I'll come down here and go into my computer I'm gonna come into my hard drive I got to come into my user name and then I have a folder called pictures and actually what I like to do is right now this little window that contains folders is so small that it's not all that navigable so if you look at the overall panels that air in bridge if you click on the edges you'll notice that there's this little scrubber bar by zoom up you'll see it you see this little grey mark right there that's an indication that you khun grab there in pull on it and you could make one area larger or smaller or if you want to get this entire area out of the way what you could do is go to one of the tabs that air there in double click on it when you double click on a tab it means collapsed down this area so that all you can see is the tap if you want to get it back just double click on the tab again it will pop back up just so you know on occasion you will have a problem with that I find it's usually when I hooked to a projector or an external screen and then disconnect what I'll find is it will look as if this is collapsed down but when I double click it won't pop back up if that's the case if it ever happens to you what it means is something happened where it was the equivalent to you grabbing the little slider bar that's here and pulling it all the way to the bottom so it wasn't really double clicked where thinks it's collapsed down it thinks you manually sized it to there so if you ever double click on one of these and it doesn't do anything just grab that little edge and pull it up but that's something that happens to me all the time and it's uh if you're not aware of it can be annoying so anyway I'll double click there so anyway let's say I've navigated to a particular folder I've got that folder and now that's something I need to access quite frequently well if I go to the file menu come down near the bottom that's a choice called add two favorites and if I choose that now when I go to the favorites tab you're going to find that folder listed as well and so I will frequently put folders and here I have one for my seminar for photos I also have one for a lot of different folders were commonly file images in that way if I ever need to move a picture I always have that sitting there very quick and easy to get to so like I say you got folders you got favorites if you want to move files I need to do is click on an image that you might find you'll see a thumbnail for it and drag it over to that area on the left and you put it on top of any one of those folders and if you let go it will be moved there and so that's when it's nice having the favorites tab if you just downloaded something from the internet some pictures something you want to put it somewhere you go to your favorites tab and if you have the folders that you commonly put things in sitting there then I can come over here and drag right over either to store it in there or to navigate to it so I can quickly access and see what's in there all right then when you're navigating your hard drive there's also something known as the path bar and it tells you where you are right now it's found just above all the thumbnails there there it's this line of text across the top of my screen and it simply says that I started out if I navigated to this folder with my computer then I went into my hard drive user my user name and so on that's the path it would take to manually navigate to this particular folder what's nice about the path bar is I can click on any one of these things that are listed to navigate to that particular level so here I'm gonna click on this particular folder and it will bring me to a different part of my hard drive is if I navigated just to that spot and therefore it can easily go back a few levels on my hard drive and then drill back down in to wherever it is I wanted to be looking but that gives you an idea of where you are right now and if you want to move back a level just click on a particular part of that and you'll quickly go there one thing that I like to do though it's sometimes I won't be in bridge I might have bridge running but I'm not actively looking at it so I go over here and hide bridge fact let me hide photo shop so you see my desktop and let's say that I went in here and I navigated two particular folder manually they came in here just was navigating my hard drive coming in in finding where I want to be now I really wish I could see the contents of this folder in bridge but I didn't navigate it to it and bridge and so how can I quickly get to it well here's one method if I click on that folder I could drag it to my doc my doc is usually at the bottom of my screen I haven't seen my doc is automatically hidden so it only pops up when I move my mouse to the bottom edge on my screen and I could just drag the folder on top of the bridge icon and if I let go it should navigate me if I don't pause for too long like I did to that folder instantly and so I find that to be really useful I can also grab more than one folder and drag it to the bridge icon and if I do I'll get one window for each folder and I sometimes find that to be more convenient cause I'm not thinking at the moment about looking at something in bridge I'm just navigating around my drive but then I noticed some pictures and I really wish I could see what they'd look like so I just drag him down to the bridge icon automatically brings me to that particular spot again we got the structure of your hard drive on the left just click on the arrows to collapse or expand any particular area click on the folder and you can see its contents now once were in here we have a bunch of different options for how to viewer images first off the thumbnails that you're seeing you can control the size of the thumbnails and a couple different ways on the bottom right of my screen there's a little slider bar right in the bottom edge of the screen and if I come down there and click on the slider bar drag it to the right I can make the thumbnails larger or I can drag the left to make them smaller I almost never touch that the reason I never touched that is there is another way of doing that I find to be faster have used hunter shot for twenty years I'm used to using keyboard shortcuts I find some people love keyboard shortcuts because they use photo shop every day all day and therefore you used to them other people hate keyboard shortcuts could use photo shop about two hours a week and you could never remember them so usually shame more than one way of doing things depending on what your preferences but if I hold on the command key on a mac that's controlling windows which I'm holding now right now I can press the plus or the minus keys on my keyboard if I do command plus or command minus it's going to make the thumbnails larger or smaller for me and that's what I usually use because if I use the little slider bar usually I can easily end up with kind of in between sizes where the space between the icons becomes kind of great and if it's a little less efficient in the layout where so I do command plus and command minus it brings it exactly the amount needed to fit an extra icon across horizontally and so I find it just be a little bit more efficient it's up to you though either use the slider were used the command plus and minus then there's something special and that is if you change the size of those thumbnails notice at the bottom of my screen right now do you notice that some of the images air being halfway cut off that's just because the size of the icons air for thumbnails are such that they're partially flowing off the screen it was a special feature in the lower right of my screen that will prevent that from happening in the lower right you'll find some icons let's zoom up on and there's this icon right here looks kind of like a grid if I click on that icon it turns on what's known as the thumbnail grid the thumbnail grid is going to prevent photoshopped from ever cutting off the edge of a thumb now where it's partially shone within the window so I'm gonna click that and now notice that none of the images are cut off and even if I use that little slider working make the images look slightly larger slightly bigger that's no longer the case because it will no longer be able to cut off the bottom edge of any of the images and so I kind of like that because otherwise I feel like any scroll a little bit to see a little bit of what's at the bottom but if I have that grid turned on then I'm never going to be seen a partial thumb now so remember that's the bottom of my screen bottom right in it's an icon that looks like a little grid it's right next to the thumbnail slider it's up to you if you like it or not though so I'm not gonna force you to have it on all right then notice my file names my file names at the moment are very long and so they're taking up two lines of text sometimes those file names just get in the way they make it so you can see fewer images because the filings are taking up some space there is a way of hiding the file names because sometimes you just want to sort out your pictures and I usually do that with the keyboard I'll actually have to look where it is and a menu because I never access it from a menu I'm assuming it will be under the view menu though and in here somewhere will be a choice of thumbnail only yes see that show thumbnails only the keyboard shortcut for it is command tianna macintosh that would be control team windows just think of this thumb now command tea for thumbnails so if I type that watch what happens command tea you see that now I could seymour images because I'm not having the file names take up space so command tea or if you hate keyboard shortcuts go to the view menu and there's a choice of show thumbnail only now if you get the course there will be a guide to keyboard shortcuts and part of that will be essential keyboard shortcuts I don't always list absolutely every keyboard shortcut because there are some that I absolutely never use and I find to be even less efficient than then other methods so sometimes I won't list those but they'll be list of essential keyboard shortcuts and what we're going to try to do is to actually make them as little squares s o that they're broken down into the absolute essentials and then what you should learn after that and then the little refinements and their idea there is that you could cut out that little part of the sheet of paper and stick it to the edge of your monitor for a week and get used to the keyboard shortcuts once you got all those in your head take it down and put up the next one when should the intermediate ones take it down put up the third one and then you get the little refinements in that way you don't look at a sheet of paper just jammed with keyboard shortcuts instead it's in there in a way where you're gonna actually try to absorb it that makes sense so let's take a look at other things we can do now when you click on an image in the upper right you're going to see a preview if you find that that preview isn't there because you've used bridge and past and somehow you got it to go away any of these panels that you see me using that surround my screen if you don't find the particular panel that I use on your screen you can go up to the window menu and that lists all the panels you could possibly have visible so if you ever see that I'm accessing one you don't see it on your screen go right up here to find it or if there's one that you find you never use go to the same menu and just turn off to get it hidden so the preview panel it's a little pretty small right now it's almost the same size of my thumb now so let's see how it could make it more useful first I'm going to get rid of the area below that's called meta data remember you have to methods for making an area smaller want us to grab the little scrubby bar above it and drag or the other is a double click on the name of that area and that would collapse it down so I just double clicked on the name then if I want to get this to still be larger there's also one of those little scrubby bars on the left edge of the preview so if I zoom up you can actually see this slight little gray bar there that's just supposed to be a hint that you could grab there I'm going to click there you can actually click anywhere on that vertical bar and I could make that larger so now I can go through my images and get a bigger preview over on the right side even if my thumbnails over here might be quite small and when you're going through your images you can always use the arrow keys to cycle through them so if I just used the right roky I can easily go to the next image next image or the down arrow key to go down and move around but that previous still isn't all that big so sometimes I really want to see a much bigger view of my image and their two ways I can do that let's say needed check focus because let's say these are pictures of people if their eyes or out of focus I might as well throw the image away unless it's a really creative shot of them eso if I want to be able to check focus and just see a larger view aiken do it within this preview even if it's quite small all I need to do is move my mouth it's within the preview and click the mouse button and it's going to show me a zoomed up version of that and it might take a moment if it hasn't generated a full size preview for to show up but then I contract right from where I clicked to see different parts of the image to see is it really sharp or not now if you see your co workers or your buddies using this feature and you want to mess him up when they when you click on the image type command plus or command minus that's control plus a control minus and windows to make it so it's not one hundred percent view instead it's like three hundred percent view and then every time they click there going to be instead of seeing one hundred percent view they're going to see a mega pixelated ridiculous view somebody does that to you remember command plus in command minus will zoom in zoom out on that view the furthest you can zoom out there was one hundred percent view which is like normal full sides for you and to get rid of this all you need to do is click right in the corner of it it'll go away again so it's a great power chip ben a great joke which I love onda powerchip I've never I knew you could do that zooming in and out so I don't mess with you but you can't go under one hundred percent right cause I always feel it's too blown up no well one hundred percent is the only view wearily where I can check focus if I meant anything less than a hundred I'm not seeing all the detail it's in the image and so it's mainly there so you can check focus under people's eyes that kind of stuff cool thank you another way though to see a larger version of your picture is just press the space bar when you press the space bar they'll take your invention make it full screen press the space bar a second time you go back to how we reviewing it before and still it's also a nice way to do a very quick slide show if you're clicked on any image just hit space bar and then if you want to go through the rest of the images you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard so I could do right roky and show you here quick slide show press and hold there ok it can look ridiculous that kind of thing a little dizzy but space bars what gives you that full screen view of your image I find that to be great and I should mention that even if your light room user I still use bridge for those images that I don't want to see ever again meaning somebody e mailed me a picture I don't need it in my photo library you know I downloaded twelve images from the internet of some house that I was thinking about you know buying and putting a bid in on or something like that I don't need it my light room library too look at you know ten years from now or anything like that I just want to see it real quick so even if your light room user I still use bridge for some things uh so space bar is full screen space bar again to get out of it now if you'd rather do a real slideshow you can come up to the view menu and there's a choice of slideshow and that would be where I don't have to use the arrow keys to cycle through instead it would automatically advance on you and right below that are slideshow options so you can choose how long is it going to display each image what kind of transition you get that kind of stuff but it is a pretty basic slideshow you're not gonna have like music plane to it or anything like that but if I choose slideshow options here are the options for it main thing is do you want to repeat or not and if you choose zoom back and forth it will literally zoom in and out on your pictures which can be nice or could be quite annoying when it's cutting off the most important part of your image is it zooms in that kind of stuff I rarely use that I mainly make it repeat or not and then make it a certain duration and then if you wanted to fit her fill so that do you want to see black bars where the image wouldn't have enough to fill the screen that capital type of thing and you can either hit play here or just hit done to set up the settings you used for the next time you go to the view menu and choose slideshow so now I'm playing a slideshow and when you're playing a slideshow you can hit the space bar to manually stop it like pause your slide show hit the space bar again and we'll start back up again and you can manually advance or go back let's say somebody asked me a question on an image just use the arrow keys if you want a little bit of control so these are some pictures from my recent trip just got back from and uh all of those are from portugal all right so we can some idea howto viewer images we have thumb now remember there's a slider at the bottom to control the size of the thumb now's or keyboard is command plus and command minus on a mac that's control plus and control minus and windows to make him larger or smaller and to make it so we never get cut off at the bottom that is an icon nearthe lower right it's just to the right of that slider I was using to change their size and you can tell if that features turned on or not because there'll be a grid in between your thumb now's a little gray lines in between if I turn off that feature you see that there is no grid of gray lines in between and so that means that it will easily be able to cut off the edges of things space bar was full screen mode and click within the preview to see you seem tuned up version it might look bad for a moment that's just because it needs to load the entire picture to create a full size image and so you can then move this around to get rid of it click in the upper left corner that's where you originally click to get it to show up and it should disappear