Lessons

Lesson Info

Adobe Bridge

So let's dive in and take a look at some of the new features that have been added to Photoshop Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw in the recent past. Now, I should mention, one of these sessions will be a little shorter than really it deserves. And that's because the particular feature I'll be covering is the masking in Adobe Camera Raw. And I have an entire class on only that topic. And therefore, I can fill the entire length of the class on that. Whereas here, I'll just give you a snippet where you get a good idea of how to use what you might be used to. But if you really wanna get in-depth, then check out my other class here on Creative Live. But let's dive in and get started. Here, I am in Bridge. And let's look at a few of the changes I've made recently. Notice, a lot of these images have been rated. Well, if you wanna rate an image, you can always come up here to the Label menu, and there you find your ratings. If you look to the right, you see the keyboard shortcuts used. On Mac, it's ...

Command + 1 through 5 to give it a rating. Well, some people would rather just type the number. So therefore, they could so quickly change between different ratings. If that's what you'd wanna do, go to the lower right, just below all these thumbnails. And there's a new checkbox down here that says Use command for labels and ratings. If that's turned on, and I hit the number keys on my keyboard, it's going to highlight the first file that is closest to that number. So if I type 2, I get to the first image that might have a two in its file name. But if I would rather change the rating, I'm gonna turn off that checkbox, and so now, the number keys themselves are gonna change ratings. So I can very quickly make this a two star, go to the next image with the arrow keys, hit the number 3 to make that a three star, and so on. And very quickly, be able to change them. If you go up to the Label menu, you'll find the numbers listed on the side have changed. And the same works when applying labels, unless you wanna apply purple, which you have to come down here to the menu to get to. Then, let's go and find a video file. Here, we got a video, and notice when I move my mouse over it, and hover, and just kinda move it right to left. I'm getting a preview of that video. Well, you can go over here to your preferences in Bridge, and under the choice called thumbnails, that's where you find the choice called Preview video on mouseover. If that's turned off, you wouldn't get a preview like I just showed you. But with that new feature, you can just have that turned on, click Okay, and whenever you have video files now, it's much easier to get a preview for what's contained inside. Then, let's say I wanna take a bunch of images like these, and I wanna save them out at various sizes. Maybe one size optimized for Instagram, one size optimized for my phone, and that kind of thing. Well, in the past, you could select a large number of images, you go to the Tools menu, and you could come down here to Photoshop, and then there was a choice called the Image Processor. And this would allow you to save out multiple versions of your picture. But if you look in here, you could only save JPEG, Photoshop and TIF, and there wasn't a choice in here to end up saving more than one JPEG. What if I wanna save out like five different size JPEGs of a file? So I can have one to email to a client, one to be used on Instagram and so on. Well, if you look in the left side of Bridge, you might find this area called workflow. If you don't, you can go up here to the Window menu. This lists all the various panels that you have available in Bridge, and you could turn it on by choosing this option. Here, we have a list of workflows. These are all things that I had to create. I'll show you how to create them in a moment, but first, lemme show you what they do. I'm gonna take this series of images. It looks like I have all except for one image selected right now, and what I'd like to do is save all these out as JPEG files. They're currently RAW and Photoshop file format images, and the ideal resolution, the width, in pixels, for Instagram is 1080 pixels. So I'm gonna drag this down here to where it says 1080. And it tells me now it has seven files that have been dragged to that size. Then, let's say I need to email these to a client as well. And when I email 'em to the client, I might need 'em to be 800 pixels. And maybe I'm just gonna take one of the files and do that 'cause I'm not sure if they want me to use this on Instagram. So I'm gonna drag that down here. Then, here, we have the choice to start workflow. And when I do, whatever images I've dragged to all of these choices here when I hit Start Workflow will get a little progress. And it says it's working on one of seven files, it'll just take it a few seconds to open all those images and save them out. What's nice is you don't even have to have Photoshop running to get this to work. Whereas, that old choice that I showed you earlier needed to do stuff in Photoshop to get this saving and scaling down to happen. Well, I'm gonna click Close here, and let's see how you can set up your own workflows, because you might have different sizes that you need to save to. So up at the top of my screen in bridge, you'll find these various choices at the top. If I click on the choice called workflow, that's where we can make a new one of these. So on the left side of my screen where you see the workflow list, I'm gonna click the choice called Create New Workflow. When I do, the right side of my screen will change, and right up here, I can change the name of this particular workflow I'm about to make. And I'm just gonna call this one 400, I'm gonna put px for pixels, and I'll just call it thumbnail. Because when I upload things to my website, there's often thumbnails for images, then you click on the image and see the full size one. And this one will create what I want. Below that, it says Workflow Saving Options. And I wanted to tell it where to save this file. I could save it where the original is, but I wanna be able to quickly upload these, so I'm gonna click here and I'm gonna tell it I wanna save to a specific folder, then I'll click Browse, and I'm gonna navigate to my desktop and hit Open. So now, it's gonna be saved to my desktop. I don't need it saved in a subfolder, but I could do that. And then let's build up what we want this to do. Over here in the middle portion, there's a little plus sign at the bottom. And I'm gonna click on that, and what I'm gonna tell it to do is first change the format of the image, because these are RAW files and Photoshop file format images. Up here, it says Change Format, it's highlighted in blue, and over on the right side, it now has an extra area that gives me the settings for that particular choice. And I'm gonna use JPEG, but, these are the other choices that I have. And I'm gonna make my quality eight, that's fine. Then I'm gonna come back to this area, hit the plus sign, and I don't wanna use the original file name, so I'm gonna come in here and say Batch Rename. And then over here on the right, I can formulate exactly how the file name should be created. It gives me some defaults in here, but I'm gonna click on this little popup menu and say I'd like to use the current file name that it started with. And then I'm gonna hit the little delete icon here for most of these other things. And I'm just gonna keep that second one that says Text. It's got a little underscoring in it already and I'm just gonna add to that thumb, meaning thumbnail size. But in order to be able to use any of these namings, you must save it as a preset, otherwise it's not gonna remember this stuff. So you see this little down pointing arrow, that's to save this as a preset. And I'm just gonna call it, Name_thumb, and click Okay. Now, it can use that, and in the future, if I ever wanna use the same combination, I can just choose it from this popup menu. So now, we're gonna change the format and we're gonna batch rename, but there's one other thing I'd like to do. I don't need a full size image. So let's hit the plus sign down here and let's say that we wanna resize this. And what I wanna do is make it so it's 400 pixels. So here, I'll say resize to, and I'm gonna make it fit the long edge of my picture. And I'm gonna tell it to make it 400 pixels. Now, the resolution doesn't matter, but I'm just, outta habit, gonna type in if it's anything used for multimedia like the web or onscreen use, and I'll type in 300 if it's used for print. The only thing that would matter for is if you were to reopen the image and type text in it. Would it consider it, you know, how big would it consider it to be. So I think that's fine. So now I have it so it's changing the format, it's gonna rename the file, and it's gonna resize the file. On the upper-right, I'm gonna hit Save to actually save that workflow. And if you look in the lower-left of my screen, there you can see it, 400 px thumbnail. Just be careful because the order of these can be important. The main thing that's important if you work with RAW files is that you change the format before you resize anything. Because you can't resize a RAW file and keep it RAW. And therefore, it would give you an error if you had resized at the beginning and you work with RAW files. Anyway, I got that set up now, let's switch over here these top choices there are on workflows back to essentials. That's where we were before. And now let's test this. First, I'm gonna go to my desktop and clear off anything that's there. Because we've used this before and saved out all these files. And I'm gonna delete 'em. So then I can return here and let's grab all these, and let's drag it over here to the 400 px thumbnail. It says we got eight files, and now we hit Start Workflow. This comes up and you can see it starting. And up here, these last two, those are just the last two times I used this. It's gonna keep a general record of what you've done, but there's no need to. You can always hit the Clear button or click these little Xs to clear things out. There, it's done. I might as well clear the list. Sure, you wanna clear it? Yeah, don't show that again, and hit Close. So now, if I actually go and look at my desktop, here are all those files. And each one of these files is 400 pixels in the widest dimension. But what's really cool about this is you can drag all these images onto multiple ones of these workflows, and then hit start workflow, and get multiple copies of those files.