Introduction to Portrait Workflow & Bridge Organization
Blake Rudis
Lesson Info
107. Introduction to Portrait Workflow & Bridge Organization
Lessons
Bootcamp Introduction
16:22 2The Bridge Interface
13:33 3Setting up Bridge
06:55 4Overview of Bridge
11:29 5Practical Application of Bridge
27:56 6Introduction to Raw Editing
11:00 7Setting up ACR Preferences & Interface
07:39 8Global Tools Part 1
16:44Global Tools Part 2
20:01 10Local Tools
22:56 11Introduction to the Photoshop Interface
07:13 12Toolbars, Menus and Windows
25:07 13Setup and Interface
11:48 14Adobe Libraries
05:57 15Saving Files
07:39 16Introduction to Cropping
12:10 17Cropping for Composition in ACR
04:44 18Cropping for Composition in Photoshop
12:40 19Cropping for the Subject in Post
03:25 20Cropping for Print
07:34 21Perspective Cropping in Photoshop
07:11 22Introduction to Layers
08:42 23Vector & Raster Layers Basics
05:05 24Adjustment Layers in Photoshop
27:35 25Organizing and Managing Layers
15:35 26Introduction to Layer Tools and Blend Modes
21:34 27Screen and Multiply and Overlay
09:15 28Soft Light Blend Mode
07:34 29Color and Luminosity Blend Modes
12:47 30Color Burn and Color Dodge Blend Modes
07:43 31Introduction to Layer Styles
11:43 32Practical Application: Layer Tools
13:06 33Introduction to Masks and Brushes
04:43 34Brush Basics
09:22 35Custom Brushes
04:01 36Brush Mask: Vignettes
06:58 37Brush Mask: Curves Dodge & Burn
06:53 38Brush Mask: Hue & Saturation
07:52 39Mask Groups
05:52 40Clipping Masks
04:11 41Masking in Adobe Camera Raw
07:06 42Practical Applications: Masks
14:03 43Introduction to Selections
05:42 44Basic Selection Tools
17:41 45The Pen Tool
11:56 46Masks from Selections
04:22 47Selecting Subjects and Masking
07:11 48Color Range Mask
17:35 49Luminosity Masks Basics
12:00 50Introduction to Cleanup Tools
07:02 51Adobe Camera Raw
10:16 52Healing and Spot Healing Brush
14:56 53The Clone Stamp Tool
10:20 54The Patch Tool
06:38 55Content Aware Move Tool
04:56 56Content Aware Fill
06:46 57Custom Cleanup Selections
15:42 58Introduction to Shapes and Text
13:46 59Text Basics
15:57 60Shape Basics
07:00 61Adding Text to Pictures
09:46 62Custom Water Marks
14:05 63Introduction to Smart Objects
04:37 64Smart Object Basics
09:13 65Smart Objects and Filters
09:05 66Smart Objects and Image Transformation
10:57 67Smart Objects and Album Layouts
11:40 68Smart Objects and Composites
10:47 69Introduction to Image Transforming
04:34 70ACR and Lens Correction
09:45 71Photoshop and Lens Correction
14:26 72The Warp Tool
11:16 73Perspective Transformations
20:33 74Introduction to Actions in Photoshop
09:27 75Introduction to the Actions Panel Interface
05:06 76Making Your First Action
03:49 77Modifying Actions After You Record Them
11:38 78Adding Stops to Actions
04:01 79Conditional Actions
07:36 80Actions that Communicate
25:26 81Introduction to Filters
04:38 82ACR as a Filter
09:20 83Helpful Artistic Filters
17:08 84Helpful Practical Filters
07:08 85Sharpening with Filters
07:32 86Rendering Trees
08:20 87The Oil Paint and Add Noise Filters
15:08 88Introduction to Editing Video
06:20 89Timeline for Video
08:15 90Cropping Video
03:34 91Adjustment Layers and Video
05:25 92Building Lookup Tables
07:00 93Layers, Masking Video & Working with Type
15:11 94ACR to Edit Video
06:10 95Animated Gifs
11:39 96Introduction to Creative Effects
06:08 97Black, White, and Monochrome
18:05 98Matte and Cinematic Effects
08:23 99Gradient Maps and Solid Color Grades
12:20 100Gradients
04:21 101Glow and Haze
10:23 102Introduction to Natural Retouching
05:33 103Brightening Teeth
10:25 104Clean Up with the Clone Stamp Tool
08:07 105Cleaning and Brightening Eyes
16:58 106Advanced Clean Up Techniques
24:47 107Introduction to Portrait Workflow & Bridge Organization
14:47 108ACR for Portraits Pre-Edits
21:27 109Portrait Workflow Techniques
18:46 110Introduction to Landscape Workflow & Bridge Organization
12:17 111Landscape Workflow Techniques
37:36 112Introduction to Compositing & Bridge
06:59 113Composite Workflow Techniques
34:01 114Landscape Composite Projects
24:14 115Bonus: Rothko and Workspace
05:15 116Bonus: Adding Textures to Photos
07:05 117Bonus: The Mask (Extras)
05:18 118Bonus: The Color Range Mask in ACR
04:54Lesson Info
Introduction to Portrait Workflow & Bridge Organization
In this lesson we're gonna talk about portrait workflow so I'm gonna take you all the way back to the very beginning of day one of this bootcamp when we talked about Bridge and then we went into Adobe Camera Raw and then we talked about all kinds of stuff that you could do in Photoshop. So we're gonna kind tie everything together with these next workflow segments. In this one specifically I'm gonna talk about portrait workflow so you're gonna see kinda how I look at the images after I shoot them, what I do in Bridge to cull them, and then how I bring them into Camera Raw to edit them, and then also go into Photoshop if I need to do some really advanced things. So the first thing here is Bridge. With Bridge, this is cataloging, organizing, and prioritizing the things that I need to edit. Then I'm gonna hop into Adobe Camera Raw and I'm gonna do basic adjustments like getting the exposure and the shadows and highlights looking good, chromatic aberrations, noise reduction, mild sharpening...
. And then we hop into Photoshop and that's where I would kind of hand off all of the basic stuff into Photoshop to get some of those advanced adjustments done, color grading, creating my artistic atmosphere and mood, and any artistic processing I wanna do with filters on top of that. Along the whole way I want you to keep these three things in mind, tone, color, effects and this is a very step-based process. We're doing tone-based things first, then we're getting into color-based things, and then we'll do our artistic effects that we're gonna do on top of that image. If you maintain this workflow the whole way through, you'll never ask a question about what you need to do and when and where. You do tone first, get that looking good. We do color, then we go into effects. So let's go ahead and jump into Bridge and we'll take a look at one of the photo shoots that I've done recently here. So here we are in Bridge, I'm gonna go ahead and open up this photo shoot here. This is from a recent shoot that I did for one of my friends. She's also a fellow photographer. We have a really cool kinda deal between the two of us that she shoots our family portraits, I shoot her family portraits and then we all walk away very happy with our final result. So it's a lot of fun, I have a lot of fun with these individuals. So first of all, what would I do just right off the bat? Well, because these are people, I would come in and I would make a new keyword and I'd call this keyword Alexander. That's their last name, Alexander photo shoot. Put this in the people category and then I click throughout the whole thing, shift click, and then click on their keyword so that they're keyworded so I always know that they now have keywords associated. If I wanted to go even further with that, I could keyword it down to every individual that's in that family so that I could keyword just the pictures of each individual child or just the pictures of the adults and break down my keywords into very specific categories of what I need to find and when. So if I were to put in here underneath this one, add a new sub-keyword, that sub-keyword would be parents. I could quickly go through here and look at any photos that have the parents of the Alexander shoot in them. We'll even include the kids in there too, that's not a problem. And then click that keyword. So if I ever need to filter this down based on keywords, if I just click parents, I have all the pictures of just the parents or the pictures of all of them together or if I had the pictures of just the individuals and just the kids. So I can weed things out and see things a lot easier with keywords. Keywords make your life a lot easier. After I've done that, what I would do is I would create a... After I've done that I would go ahead and go into my filmstrip view and take a look at all of these images individually and start looking at what images are gonna get prioritized to shoot. So, looking at the photographs, this is where I would start doing the control one, control two, control three, control four, control five. My winner winner chicken dinner would be control eight. Control six is it can get rejected. And that's how I would start looking at these images. So for this one, eh, it's okay, let's do control one. I'll then go to the next one, control, I don't really like the fact that I missed his knee and the bottom of his foot so control one. But if that's the only picture that I have of those two, I'm probably gonna go back to that one. So let me just control two that one, that will give me a little idea that yeah, I don't really like the fact that I cut off his knee there but I could probably creatively crop this in a way that could crop off more of those parts that I'm not necessarily worried about by fitting in a little bit less of the background there. And this one's just a funny one. She's so cute, we'll do control, that's a pretty good personality one, control two. Look at that, I know, look at that. They're just awesome kids, a lot of fun. This one, let's see what happens, if that's the only one I have of that family. That's the thing about shooting with children, they can be just here, there, and everywhere and all over. So you take what you get. Now me, personally, when it comes to me and my family, these are the types of ones that I print, especially with my middle son William, he is just crazy so getting his personality in those pictures is something I'm never gonna forget. If I had him just do that fake smile, that fake half smile, then it's just like yeah, okay, that's not the William that I know. So as a parent, I do appreciate these pictures. Not everything has to be perfect, these are still good pictures that you can deliver. This is a really good one of them so I can control three. Another good one of them. I think this one's a little bit better, let's just do control three on this one. This one we got a photo bomb from one of the kids, control one. That's pretty cute of them two, control two. Control two. I don't really like her face in the back, she looks scared, control one. That I could probably do some really awesome artistic looks with so I'd probably control three this one and then maybe even control seven it so that that tells me okay, this is something that I could probably do a really artistic portrait because of the natural look on her face and those big, beady child eyes. Another good one here, control three. Again, kids just having fun, control two. A little bit better but a little bit blown out, control two. This one, again, right now it doesn't look that great but I know that I could do some artistic processing on this to really focus the eyes right into their interaction. So I could control three that one. That's a pretty good one, control three. Again, just having fun, control, that's kinda fun, making an animated GIF out of that one. (audience laughing) Control three. That's kinda cute, control three. That's a good one, control three. That's pretty good, control three. There's one I have in here of her that is just phenomenal. This one I'd probably control two, it's blown out. Control one, I can use that. This one, do some really awesome artistic processing on this one. There's a lot of character in this one, there's a lot of interaction between her, what's happening with the rest of the area around her so control three. That would probably even be a control four because I could definitely do something with that. I like the portrait that's here. Don't like the fact that it's dead center but I could always crop it later, control three. Again, just family interaction, this could be a good print to deliver to them, control three. Control three. Control two. Control one, I could crop the photo bomb out in the bottom right corner. This, I could probably brighten it up and still get a lot of that. What I was going for here is I like the light on the side of their face but it was a little blown out too much. I know my camera well enough that I know that even though this is kind of underexposed, I can still go and brighten up those areas in Adobe Camera Raw and not lose them and still have that beautiful light that's on the side of their face. So a lot of times we just don't show, especially if you're photographing another photographer, like, yeah, just don't look at this one. (laughing) But I know that I could do something with this that would take it a little bit further so maybe control three on that one. I'm a little less critical with myself on landscape, on portrait photography as I am on landscape photography. Landscape photography, my control threes and my control fours are a lot less because I want that one very perfect image. Now when I'm delivering photos to clients, especially in a portrait shoot like this, I need to consider that I'm gonna have a lot more control threes 'cause if I were to treat a portrait shoot like my landscape shoots, this family would get one picture. And I don't think they'd be pretty excited about that. So that's why I would probably do a little bit more on my control threes and my control fours here as I'm culling through these images in Bridge. I like that one, control four. They're all good faces there. These ones are good. I don't like that sign over there so that's something that if I was gonna deliver this image I'd get a little bit more nitpicky with and I'd probably get into Photoshop and do some cloning with that to get rid of that so we'll just move to the next one. This one's kinda cute, just their interaction but I got a good one of their faces so control two. I like this one. This one the B's right above his head. Good job, Blake. We'll just do control three on this, control two on that one. Of these three, this one would probably be the best, control three. Control one, I could probably just delete that one, control one. That's kinda fun, control three. Don't like how it's cropped, control one to delete. That wouldn't be a bad one to deliver. That probably wouldn't be a bad one to deliver, again. Eh, don't like the side view on that one, I'd probably control one that one. This one's pretty good, control three or control four on that one. She was just so much fun. Getting to know the kids when you're doing a portrait shoot is very important. The first probably 15 minutes of hanging out with them, I was just hanging out with their kids because you can't really have the parents focus on keeping those kids in line, that's kind of your job. So if the parents are upset and the kids are running around doing stuff, then when they go to take those pictures it's gonna be forced and there's not gonna be a lot of fun. So I'd get on the ground with the kids before we even started the shoot, just talk to them, get to know what their interests are, ask them what they like, what's fun, get some fun shots with them just so that they're comfortable with the camera so that when I say okay, we can have some fun, but how about you go over there with mom and dad and smile for me. They're like okay, cool. And then they go ahead and do it. That way the parents don't have to be trying to corral the kids and screaming at the kids, "Hey, just smile, dang it," because I know that's what I do to my boys. (audience laughing) But she's very good with that. I learned a lot, she photographed us first, so I was less concerned with how she was photographing us and more concerned with how she was treating our children so that when I went to photographs hers I was like okay, this is how I'm gonna, and it helps, it definitely helps, take those notes. Next, this one I don't really care too much for. That's kinda cute, control three. There she is. I told her to shoot my like Harry Potter would. But yeah, so then if I look at these images and I look now at my star ratings over there, I can see what my ones are. If I take away these check marks and just look at my ones, what do I have listed here as my ones? These are all the images that I'll do a second pass on. After I've labeled it a one, I wanna be sure that that's something that I wanna delete. After looking at my images, if I label something a one and then realize, well, I don't have any other photos like that, can I make that work? If I really needed to make it work, would I have to do a head swap? That's a pain in the butt but if I needed to make it work because I didn't have that pose anywhere else, that's where I'd wanna consider doing something like that. So with this one, I've got plenty of poses with them hanging out so this one I could definitely delete. And if I wanted to really let myself know that, I would control six this one so that it's red for reject. This one, control six 'cause we got another good one. This one we already had a good one of them so control six. That can remain a one. We already had a bunch of them together so control six. I had a better one there. Didn't really like that one 'cause we had another better one. So these could all go. So then after I control six them, I could right click on them, right click, and I could just delete them if I don't want them. If I wanted to save them I could but I just know that I don't need to have those included anymore. Then I'll look at my two stars. Take a look at those two stars and see what I've got in the two stars. This one, I didn't have any other picture of the two of them together so I'm probably gonna have to get a little bit creative with the crop on this one. So I'm gonna have to bump this up from a control two to control three. That's just to tell me, hey, process this one. So then I'll look at this one, we have plenty of her with her funny character so we can just do control one. And once I control one, notice how it disappears. What it's doing is it's going into that bucket of one star images. This one's actually kinda cute so I might actually wanna three star that one. And then this one we had plenty of them, control one. And then control one, control one, control one. That's actually kinda good, I kinda like that one so I might control three that one to keep that one. Control one, control one, control one. So now I could go, if I wanted to I could go back to that bucket of the ones. These are the ones that I just know that I'm not gonna do anything with. So now after doing this shoot, after however many, I took maybe, I even think I took even more pictures than this. This is a cold version of the cold version. I took about 150 pictures, we narrowed that down to just a couple for demonstration purposes. Now I've got all my three star images here and my four star images. I would select both of these together, unlike what I did with the one and twos, because now with the four and the three star, these are the ones that I'm gonna wanna bring over to Adobe Camera Raw and start editing. Bridge is not an editor. It can't edit my images. The only thing that can right now at this point is gonna be hopping over into Adobe Camera Raw before we go into Photoshop. So I will batch edit these in Adobe Camera Raw. A lot of times people use Lightroom. If you use Lightroom, this might be not something that you'd do. If you use Bridge, the next transition is to go into Adobe Camera Raw which would be the equivalent of just after you've culled them in Lightroom, doing your basic settings in Lightroom. So I'll grab all these, press and hold shift, right click, open in Camera Raw.
Class Materials
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
Amazing course, but don't be fooled into thinking this is a beginner's course for photographers. The problem isn't Blake's explanations; they're top. The problem is the vast scope of this course and the order in which the topics are presented. Take layers for example. When I was first learning Photoshop (back when we learned from books), I found I learned little or nothing from, for example, books that covered layers before they covered how to improve/process photographs. These books taught me how to organize, move, and link layers before they showed me what a layer was actually for. Those books tended to teach me everything there is to know about layers (types of layers, how to organize them, how to move them, how to move them two at a time, how to move them two at a time even if there are other layers between the two you're interested in, useful troubleshooting tips, etc. ) all before I even know (from a photographer's point of view) what it is the things actually do. The examples of organizing, linking, and moving mean everything for graphic designers from Day One, but for photographers not so much. Blake does the same thing as those books. Topics he covers extremely early demand a lot of theoretical imagination for a photographer who doesn't already know quite a bit about what he is talking about. Learning about abstract things first and concrete things later only makes PS that much harder to understand. If you AREN'T a beginner, however, this course is amazing. I thought it would be like an Army Bootcamp, taking you from zero and building you into a fit, competent Photoshop grunt. Now I think it's more like Army Bootcamp for high school varsity jocks. It isn't going to take you from the beginning, but the amount you'll get out of it is nonetheless more than your brain can imagine. I've been using PS for years to improve my photographs, and even to create the odd artistic composite or two. The amount I've learned in the first week is amazing, and every day I learn something -- more like many things -- which I immediately implement to improve my productivity and/or widen the horizons of what I can achieve. If you ARE a photographer who's a Photoshop beginner, I'd take very seriously the advice Blake gives in the introduction: Watch one lesson, and practice the skills and principles you learn in that one lesson for two weeks. THEN watch the next lesson. You can't do that of course without buying the course, so it's up to you to decide whether you'd like to learn Photoshop and master Photoshop all from the same course. Learning it first and mastering it later will cost more money, but I think you'll understand everything better and have a much more enjoyable ride in the process. As for me? I'm going to have to find the money to buy this course. There is simply way too much content in each lesson for me to try to take on all at once, but on the other hand I don't want to miss anything at all that he has to share.
Robert Andrews
Blake Rudis is the absolute best in teaching photoshop. His knowledge and how he presents the instruction is clear and concise - there is NO ONE BETTER. Yes, his classes require some basic skills, and maybe I'd organize the order of (or group) the classes in a different order, but, let me be clear - if anyone is to be successful or famous in the Photoshop world, it should be Blake Rudis. I strongly recommend his teaching. I started photography and post processing in 2018, and because of this class, I'm know what Im doing. The energy you get when you create something beautiful is profound, it makes you bounce out of bed (at 4AM) like a 5 year old, to go create. It's a great ride! Thanks Blake, & Thanks Creative live.
Esther Gambrell
WOW!!! I've been purchasing CL classes for several years now and have watched HOURS of "How-To Photoshop" classes, but this is the first one I've actually purchased because of the AWESOME BONUS content!!! SERIOUSLY??!!?!? A PLUG-IN??? But not only that, Blake is SO easy to understand, and he breaks down concepts in different ways to connect with different people's learning styles. I REALLY appreciated this approach because I am a LEFT-BRAINED creative that has an engineering background, so I really connected to what Blake was saying. THANK YOU FOR THAT! There are TONS of Photoshop courses out there, but I found this one to be the most helpful in they way Blake teaches concepts so that you know WHY you're doing what your doing. I feel like he taught me how to fish with Photoshop to feed me for a lifetime instead of just giving me a fish to feed me for one day. This is the BEST overall PS course out there!!! Thank you!!!!