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Bridge

Lesson 1 from: Photoshop Mastery: Fundamentals

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

1. Bridge

Lesson Info

Bridge

So this is a new siri's for me, it's called photoshopped mastery and in general, throughout the serious, I'm going to try to get you to truly be comfortable using photo shop where you're not going to just be blindly following steps you're not going to have to necessarily write down things on post it notes all the time. Instead, you'll truly understand the features that are in photo shop and therefore you won't be limited to doing what I show you. Instead, you can use the features to do anything, even things that other people have never done before because you truly understand what you're doing. This class is the fundamentals, so we're gonna start with some of the basics of photo shop, and I want to show you what I consider to be the essentials we're not going to cover absolutely everything that's in there, but we're going to concentrate on what I think is the most important part in this class is really to prepare you for the other classes that aaron this siri's because there are some g...

eneral knowledge that if you don't have, then getting into more intermediate and advanced things just isn't quite appropriate yet so that's what this is all about, so in this course we're going to be going over things like resolution resolution is a setting attached your image in a lot of people get confused about it we'll talk about things like selections and layers and just how to get photo shop set up so it's not quite as intimidating is it usually would be and so that's the general idea but throughout the other sessions of this I'm going to try to make it so instead of just showing you each fit feature individually often show you how the features relate to each other for instance in a different session we'll get into a completely different day not part of the foundation's I'll show you how all of photo shops adjustments really can be divided up into threes categories and if you understand the three categories you can't understand all the adjustments within them and then you can look at things more so you can see how are each adjustment just slightly different from each other other but you're always looking back to the same core concept and it'll become I think much easier so when you go toe a menu and photo shop instead of it looking like a long list of features that you're like I don't know what you want to choose you have a much better idea of exactly where to head in exactly how to think about it so that's the general idea behind the siri's so we're going to get started with the fundamentals and part of that is to get started with bridge bridge and just in case you're not used to using it eyes installed any time you install photo shop so if you have photo shop installed, you also have bridge installed even if you've never used it any time I use bridge, this is something that could be replaced with another adobe product you'd have to purchase separately that is called light room so if you ever hear of people using light room, you can use it as an alternative to bridge, but since this classes and about light room, we're not goingto get into light room, but just so you know anything that I do in two areas of photo shop and that will be bridge in camera raw if you ever see me using either one of those two and you own light room, another adobe product, you could be doing those things and light room instead and that's usually what I would do if I owned light room um, so anyway, I just want to get into aa bridge and get started all right? So I have both bridge and photoshopped running right now, but if you don't, you would just go to whichever folder contains photo shop in the jet, same general area where photo shop is you should have bridge and when you launch bridge, this is what it should look like I just reset my preferences so I should be the same way it would be if you just installed it and so I want to show you what I consider to be the essential features of bridge and then we'll try to optimize that a little bit and finally moving to photo shop so bridge and generals what I used for browsing my images so all it does is it shows you what's on your hard drive, but instead of navigating your hard drive using your computer's operating system where it doesn't always show you great previews of your images where you can see him nice and big bridge is just going to show me the same country kent using nice big previews so I can see what the images look like so to start in the upper left is where I need to navigate my files and each one of these areas I'm going to call a pain so this is the folders in favorites pain over here below that we have filters, collections and export pains, that kind of stuff and with any of these pains on the sides I could grab the little bar that separates that section from the main area here in the middle it's a little vertical bar there move my mouth's right on top of it and I can drag to control how large this don't do that on any one of these or when I separate vertically to paine's there's a bar there as well and I can control how much space they take up also with these a couple of the things to know in that is you have multiple pains here put together as little tabs and you can just click on the names to switch between the tabs but sometimes I don't need a tab for quite a long time and it's just taking up space, so if I ever want to get rid of this area, just cause I don't need it right now. What I usually do is move my mouse on top of one of the tabs and just double click double clicking is going to collapse that down so it all you see this little tab just double click a second time, it'll pop back up, and so for now I'm going to hide this area called filter and over on the right side, I'm going to hide the area called meta data, just double clicking on him and this is how I usually start off on the left side all usually be working with my folders and on the right side, I'll have a preview. Uh, just a nice, simple set up. Now to navigate your hard drive in this area called folders. This is just a list of what's on your hard drive. It completely reflects the structure of your hard drive so that's completely dependent on how you like to save your files, how you like to organize your folders in any changes that I make with enbridge are just going to make the exact same changes on my hard drive all it is is reflect ction of how my hard drive a structured and so if I change the file name here is changing on my hard drive if I move a folder from one folder to another here it's just going to do the exact same thing on my hard drive that's all it is it just shows me the contents of my drive so here I have my desktop in the upper left and then I have various folders and I can click on the triangle for each folder to expand or collapse it and just come in here and click on various folders to browse them once I've clicked on a folder than the area in the middle is going to show me previews of what's in that folder he's just going to show me a thumbnail for each one of the pictures that are there to control the size of these thumbnails there's a slider in the bottom edge it's near the bottom right? If I zoom up down there right down here the slider is going to control how big my thumbnails are I personally don't use that slider all that often although it's nice to have it there what I do instead is there's a keyboard shortcut for changing how big the thumbnails are and it's the same keyboard shortcut you can use and photoshopped to zoom in and zoom out on your document and it's one I've been using for many years and federer shop, so I'm just used to thinking about a zooming in zooming out and what it is is on a mac. You hold down the command key that's controlling windows, and then you compress the plus and minus keys on your keyboard so used time you hit plus or minus it should end up zooming, not presuming it out to make your thumbnail smaller or larger. If you hate keyboard shortcuts, though, just go for the slider at the bottom of your screen. It's just nice to know about keyboard shortcuts because they're not always obvious when you just glance at the interface. Then if you happen to like keyboard shortcuts, you should know if a couple of them for navigating your hard drive if the last thing I did, we click on one of the folders that air over here on the left side, then if I want to navigate using my keyboard, just use the arrow keys on your keyboard. If you press the apparel, you'll go up one folder just in the list and down here we go down if you're on a folder that could be expanded, then what you can do is just press the right arrow on your keyboard and that means expand the folder I'm currently looking at press the left arrow and you'll collapse it so you could go over here and navigate your whole hard drive using just your keyboard. The only thing you have to do is start off by clicking on one of these folders because if the last thing you did was instead click on a picture within this preview area, then using the arrow keys would be cycling through those so just click on a folder first so it knows that's the area that should have what's notice focus meaning attention and then your arrow keys could be used for navigating through things, but some people hate keyboard shortcuts and if that's you use your mouse alright, then a couple of the things about working with your images I've mentioned you can change the size of your thumbnail by using the littles slider bar at the bottom or doing command plus and minus. But there are some other things you can do as well. Once you click on a picture, you should see a preview of it on the right side. If you have the preview pane visible and remember, you can change the size of this area by grabbing the little divider bar that divides it from the main part of the window, so if I click there and poll I could make that bigger or smaller so it's just not big enough feel free to expand it, but I find that oftentimes even with that expanded out it's just not big enough because my interface, the menu bar at the top, all the icons at the top and all that kind of stuff just takes up too much of the space. So here is something I like to do when I'm browsing my images, and that is after have clicked on one image to make it highlighted within the thumbnails. I press the space bar in space bar just a very quick way to say make this image fill my screen to get out of it, you just press the space bar again. Space bar means full screen what's nice is when you hit the space bar and your viewing something full screen, it doesn't mean you're stuck on this particular image. You can still use the arrow keys on your keyboard to cycle through the images. So if I just press the right arrow key, I could see the next image I shot the next image and so on it, and when I'm done, just hit space bar again and you get back to your thumbnail, then these right now, these files have their original file names and those came right off the camera. They were originally raw files now there, j pegs oftentimes they'll scale images down when I give seminars just so I don't have to wait forever to copy all my files over, and in this case, all we need to do is preview those images so I didn't need to keep him it's raw files. But the final names here came off my camera. They're not the most usable, so if you want to change the file name, just click on the file name and it should highlight the name so you can type in a new one and then here's a little trick. If you going to change the file name of other files instead of clicking on another file and then clicking on its final name and changing it press return when you're done, uh, that can be not very efficient to sit there and have to click each time change of filing. So if you just changed the file name, just hit the tab key and it'll bring you to the next image and then tab again, it'll take you to the next image. In that way, if you wanted to rename all the images that air in a particular folder, you could do so very quickly just know that if you're sorting your images by a file name. When you change the name and suddenly hit return, it might look like your image disappears. It just got sorted again by its new file name, and in this particular case is I'm naming them. They're moving to the bottom because they're being sorted by filing and anything I add that doesn't start with a lycan underscore, which is what all the other ones start with eyes going to be sorted after that, so it's suddenly moves down so any way you could type in a file name hit tab to go to the next one and just keep going. You can also do shift tab to go to the previous image of one of the left, but it's rare that I need to do that naming all the images in this folder, though would take too long, and I just want to get used tio just get away from the use useless file formats that air here and want to get all of them rename quickly because maybe I want to give these to a client, and I wanted to look like I'm organized than I am, so I'm going to select some images in here they're a bunch of different ways to select images, but if you just click on one image and you hold down the shift key in, click on another. You're going to get all the images in between the one you already had selected than the one you're clicking on right now, so if I click on again this one hold shift and I could get out serious of them if I want to get individual images instead of holding down the shift key, I'd have to hold on the command key controller in windows then I can click on individual images teo either select them or d select them, so you've got to get used to that if you're not used to using the keyboard shift means give me from the one you already have two where I'm clicking right now, whereas command just lets me click on individual pictures, so I'm going to select all these images I click on the first one I'll scroll all the way down to the last one hold shift click on we gotta mall now if I want to change the name of all of those images is instead of clicking on the name, typing in something and hitting tab to go to the next one, I could go up to the tools menu in under tools I'm going to find a choice called battery name in all battery name means is, let me type in some, you know, file name and it's going to redo all of my image is based on what I type in here it looks like it's somewhat complex in here, but it's actually not all that complex at the top it's asking for a preset if you're using one, we don't have any set up yet below that, it's asking, where do you want these to be renamed in the same folder? You want to move them or copy him somewhere else? If I'm going to give these to a client, I want to keep my original file names and I want a new folder just for these guys, so they don't see all my original funding. Maybe the original file names contained the names of models that I used in different shoots. I don't want the client to know that information, so I'll say here, copy it to another folder as you rename them and then there's a little button called browse, which would allow me to choose where they go, but in general, most the time I have it in the same folder, then down here is how it's going to rename it, and here I can get a long list of choices. I can make this list longer or shorter over here, where you have a plus and a minus button for now, I'm going to hit the minus button to remove each one of these choices, to just get down to one to start with this so it looks simpler. Uh so anyone here wants to know what should we do for a new file name? We click and there's a long list of choices all I'm going to do is start off with some text all of these shots were shot in iceland so I'm just going to call it iceland I'll hit the space bar so to be a space after that and then I'd like him to number him the first files number one and after that just continues so after I've put it said teoh text I've typed in iceland on the right side of it the plus button and now I can tell what else toe ad and in here it's called a sequence number sequence number just means number of the files I can tell it how many digits I'd like it to use don't want to use one digit because we have more than ten files in there that screwed up if I had less than ninety nine files I could use two digits and if I have more than ninety nine I might use three in this folder I'm assuming I have less than one hundred images but I'm not sure it's all use three digits then over here just wants to know what number to start with and if you go in here a second time right after using these settings the number that's in here will be changed from one toe whatever you ended with last time let's, say there's seventy five files in here. If I come in and try to rename things again, this might start with seventy six and I just have to highlight it type in one if I want to start from one below that we have some very optional things. We have preserved current file name in metadata. Uh, that just means take the original name that was on here in store it within the file so somehow I could get to it later. I usually have that turned on and here's. Why let's say I had a folder and like I said, it was named where the different files were named. Based on what models were used in a shoot, I'm going to give the images to a client. I'm going to give them generic file names. So it's called iceland one through whatever. But what if they come back to me later on? And they say, I like the image called iceland fifty three and I'd like a bigger version of it will. Somehow I need to find the original file. I have the files of names I gave them, but somehow I need to correspond them to how I store my images if I kept mine based on the name in the model in such on dh they could still find that information if they knew how to read this the most clients don't know how to read that and it would be somewhat hidden they'd have tio to know that it's stored in there but if I turn this on, it'll keep the original file name in there and they're therefore it might be easier for me to find those files on my hard drive if I gave the client once with a different name than what I use that makes any sense and then down here compatibility windows unix that just means it will limit which characters can be used so if let's say afford slash can't be used in a particular off operating system, it will limit you so can't use characters that wouldn't be compatible with those so the bottom it just tells you hey here's a example file name of what you might have started with and below that is what you're going to end up with. So in essence when you look at this most of the time I have it in the same folder most the time I have this step to text and I just type in a name in most the time I haven't numbering and I can do that, but you do have other choices in here if you'd rather have it add the date and time but theme which was shot or other choices when I hit rename now it's going to rename all those files in the names will be based on the order that the images were bichette being shown in before I went in and chose battery name with that means that if I'd like to change the order so that this is not number one, all I need to do is in here in the thumbnails click on an image in drag it to the order I wanted to go in if I want these two at the beginning I'll just tried him over there at the beginning and so you come in here and first sort your images because let's say you're doing this for a slide show and you know you're going to show the slide show by looking at a folder in sorting it based on filing therefore whatever is numbered one will be first in order to just go in order by number so you could come through here and just click and drag and organize your slide show ahead of time to get it in the exact order get like before you go to battery name if you're going to rename all of your images, then there's a keyboard shortcut for selecting all it's the same thing using many other applications command a an imac controlling and windows for select all and then the place where I found battery name was under the course menu that's where you find it all right, then, let's look at a few other parts of the interface if you've navigated to a folder and you're not sure exactly where you are in your hard drive because maybe this list of folder ah folders is really, really long and complicated because you're deep, deeply navigated into your hard drive well, right above the thumbnails, you will find a list that's horizontal right up your mind starts with computer and then macintosh hard drive and so on. This is the path that you would have to use to navigate to the folder I'm currently looking on on your hard drive, and so it just shows me that that's the path that need and if I want to navigate to different folder, one way of doing so is I can go back a level by just clicking one level back within this list. So I'm in a folder called iceland in that folder is contained within a folder called bridge, which is contained within a folder called creative live fundamentals just tells you how you got there, and if you want to go back a level, just click on the one just below that and you could go back as many levels as you need all the way back to the base level of your hard drive if you need to, but that's, a little path bar is usually what's known as so let's say I want to reorganize some images I'll go into a folder see its contents this particular folder just contains a folder and no images I can create folders I can either do that in my operating system if I do it there the next time I visit that folder in bridge I'll see the new folders sitting there where I could do it within bridge itself if I come up to the file menu you find the choice of new folder so let's say I'm going to make a slideshow from my iceland shots I want to narrow him down and I'm going to drag him over to this folder as I get him then I have a folder toe to show people for a slideshow I've made it here going up to the file menu and choosing new folder then I'm going to go into my iceland folder here you can either do it by using the folder area on the left side of your screen or if you can see the folders here within the preview area or the thumbnail area just double click on it and now if I want to move images on my hard drive I click on an image I want to move and then I could drag it to that list of folders on the left side internal highlight whatever folders underneath my mouse when I let go I'm going to physically move that on my hard drive and remember, bridge simply reflects what's on your hard drive, so any changes you make with enbridge are going to be reflected on your drive. You could just as easily move these images on your hard drive. The main thing is you're not going to see the previews got some nice shots here from the air I'll drag over now, the only problem with this is let's say I want to make that slide show from planning on for iceland, but I don't want to move these images I want to have them all pristinely and their original folder. What I want to do is move a copy of them well in photo shop there's a generic key you can hold down that with most tools means let's work on a copy of something this is true not just here in bridge, but when you're in the main part of photo shop and you want to move something let's, say with the move tool or many other other things and what that is is you hold on option chiana mac all time windows in generically that usually means work on a copy so you can tell if you're holding down the right key because if you drag over here to a folder, look at what my mouse looks like can you see a little green circle? It's got a plus sign in it the plus sign indicates it's going to be a copy if I didn't have the option he held down on a dragged over, I wouldn't see that little green circle with a plus sign, so hold on option tried over and now there's going to be two versions of that file, one in the original folder in one in my slideshow folder, and I do that very frequently because I just need to get some images ready for a client. I'll create a folder on the desktop to put him in, and then I'll start dragging things over there from multiple folders, and I'll be just be holding on the option key the whole time, and therefore I know I'm not disturbing my original folder. All the files remain in there, and just the copies will be over there. You can do the same thing when dragging of folder. If you hold on the option key, you just drag an entire copy of everything that's in that folder, and I find that to be rather useful. Uh, if you're on a macintosh, you could also drag things, not just the folders let's say I wanted to open one of these images, usually double clicking on it would open it in photo shop, but let's say I have another program running. Some weird program I I'd like to use on occasion, but it's not made by adobe, you can also click on an image, and instead of dragging it to a folder, you can drag it to the body of your screen to the dock on a mac. If you drag down there, you get the list of applications that are currently running, and I could drag it on top of whichever icons would be compatible with that type of file. So if I wanted to open this in, I don't know what the program want to use let's say, I'm going to dio hdr processing with a program called photo matics. I could just drag my images down there, and even though bridge might not be designed that work with that program, I can force it to open them and different programs by dragging to the dock, so I've mentioned one way to organize a slide show, for instance, would be to drag things over to a new folder you could hold on the option key if you want to drag copies, but there are other ways of organizing your files that can be useful. Let's. Take a look at one of those if I go to the bottom left of my screen that's, where I'll find the tabs of filter collection and export, I'm gonna click on the tab called collections. And clicking on it will expand it, so you see what's there and I can see that some other instructors have used this feature before because there's some collection is already sitting there that I haven't made and this isn't my computer, so who knows what would be set up in here? But collections are virtual folders, unlike the folder list above, where it completely reflects the contents of your hard drive, we're moving a file from one folder to another will do the exact same thing in your hard drive with these things, which are called collections it's like a folder, but dragging something on top of us collection just remembers where it's stored on your hard drive but doesn't actually move it so let's see how we could use those at the bottom of the collections area there's some icons you have a one with a little plus sign on it, and one with the gear. The one with the plus sign creates a collection, and if I click on it, it'll have the name highlighted and I'll just call this iceland slideshow I've been iceland, I think seven or eight times I can't remember how many times and so I might want to make a slide show out of images that air from multiple folders I don't want a copy on my hard drive because I don't know if I'm you know present that slide show or not I'm just getting ready, so if somebody asked me in the future to show him a slide show, I'll be ready, but I don't want a folder with copied everything over there that might double the file size of everything's have two copies of them now in all that I just want to set it up so I'm ready if somebody happens to ask makes sense these images might be stored in multiple folders on my hard drive because I store my image is based on the date that I shot them and if it then the iceland six or seven or eight times, I'm going to have that many folders that I've shot from iceland, so here I'll just go into my folder list click on a folder that might contain some of the images I want to use and then I'll just click on a file and drag it on top of that collection remember I created the collection right at the bottom of this area there's a little icon with a plus sign I'm right there and that's what ended up making them in the first place? And so I'm just going to drag a few images over there knowing that any time I use a collection it does not change where things are stored on my hard drive at all it will not change the what's on my drive all it's going to do is remember where these files are and so I'm just going to come in here and see if there's any other images I might want to drag over next to the name of the collection will be a number that number indicates how many images I've dragged on top of the collection let's make sure I got all that I want in there then at any time in the future I can click on the name of that collection in it'll show me all the images that I've ever dragged on top of it those images can be located in multiple folders multiple hard drugs they could be all over my computer's storage system and by dragging them here they haven't moved a thing on my hard drive it just makes it convenient to be able to track thing so oftentimes I have collections set up for textures let's say because I like to apply textures on top of my images and when I run into them randomly on the street I take photographs of them I'm not going to remember that I captured one texture when I was in iceland and another one when I was in seattle but when I'm reviewing my images right after I first shot him I go in there and say oh well there's a texture image and I drag it on top of the collection I have called textures I might also do the same for skies because if you ever need to replace a boring sky in one photo with him more exciting one from another you never know when you're going to capture that sky. So if you have a collection called skies every time you view images, anytime you see good looking skies might drag it on top of that collection than any time you need to replace a boring sky. You click on the collection you can see all your skies regardless of where they're stored on your hard drive makes sense. There is one other thing you can do with collections in that as you can create something called a smart collection you got under there at the bottom remember how we had that I come with the plus sign on it there's also one with the gear if you click on the one with the gear, this comes up that's known as a smart collection and you could think of it as a saved search like an automatic search let's say I want to show my newest pictures once I've shot this month, but I want to show every single picture I shot this month. I want to show you my good pictures from this month, so what I could do is hear it says look in and I can tell it where are my hard drive? It should look and if I don't see within this the folder that I'm thinking of I can either use the current folder that I'm currently viewing in bridge, or the choice here called browse, which will give me a standard dialog box that allows you to navigate your computer so I can come in here and say, I want to go to my desktop, just navigate to wherever I want it open. But most the time I never get to the folder ahead of time using bridge and therefore on this menu I could just choose use current folder, and I have to deal with all that then down here for criteria, I can tell it what, how it should find things. This is just a search I could say file name contains some people end up putting hero on the end of the really good files for your hero files of some people will end up putting the word done or final, you know, when they're done prosecuted, processing the retouching images so you could type that in here if you'd like. And also in bridgeview khun rate things with star ratings one through, I think about five stars you could use that instead, so what I might want to do is this let's say I set this first menu to what date the file was create. And then I can come of it here and say that it was a greater than or less than uh any kind of date I would like maybe it's less than the last month that kind of thing and then I could come in here and as the second choice I just hit the plus sign I could say in here has a rating that is greater than four stars and therefore now what's going to appear in this particular collection when I end up using it is anything with the date created and I'll say here is greater than a particular date let's say everything this year so I could go over here and say um it's greater than january first twenty thirteen and has four stars a crater then I could say down here matches this if any of these air met I don't want any because that would mean I get all the images that equal this or this I want to say if all criteria are met so both of these things match and then should I haven't looked within sub folders and that kind of stuff this part here just means make sure you look at all the images not just images you've already browsed in things I'd leave that on click save and I can create those kinds of things anyway this one uh over here is where your smart collections will show up the ones with little gears on them and that's how you end up getting to it right now? I don't know, I haven't set to a weird folder, I would have tio tell it to look at the current one, senators, many of these, as you'd like if you want to get rid of any you've already created just highlighted within the list and then hit the trash button. So if I want to get rid of maui flowers because unfortunately and hear this, ah, collections that are already here are ones that other people have created and whatever folders that they had at the time to have them search are no longer on this hard drive and so it's giving me weird messages when I click on them. Usually you can click on the name of one and then hit the trash sign. It looks like though the ones that are created with a smart collection, I can't click on them if they folder doesn't exist anymore. So it's kind of odd. Ah, but usually this is on my drive and it's very easy to click on it, then hit delete so collections could be very useful but don't rely on them too much, because if you make changes outside of photo shop, then the collection will be aware that that's the case and suddenly images that you had. Originally put into a collection just won't be there and there won't any warning to say hey that image is missing instead you'd have to make changes within bridge here so bridge is aware of the changes that you made and so if you move images when you're not within bridge suddenly that collection could become broken where it's like hey I don't know where that file is I'm just not going to show it and so I use collections kind of on a short term basis where I know I'm going to get it set up and then I might use it relatively soon knowing that if I move things manually it could mess things up so I got to keep a little bit careful with that so other things about bridge just basic standpoint the main thing is when I'm trying to narrow down a serious of him inches they're a bunch of different ways of doing so on and I just want to cover a few one is if I look at an image below each image are going to be little dots on lee when you've clicked on the image noticed this image doesn't have little dots below it but this one does by click over here the dots show up those little dots there just waiting for me to click on him those dots all they do is raped my image one star two star three running all the way up here to five if I click just a left of it when this kind of empty space it's going to get rid of the rating so I could go around and rate a bunch of these images by just moving my mouse on top of it, and then the little dots appear below that, I can click on to rate them. If you don't like trying to find this little dots, you can also go up too the label menu, and here you can rate them as well, and it also lists keyboard shortcuts that air here command one through five and so you could end up rating images, or you can end up applying labels to them and these labels khun b named you can name them in your preferences if you go to your preferences, I can change which each one of these air called I usually have these something like evaluate is what I have one label set up, and all that means is look at this image in the future to see if it's worth processing in that way. Any time I've importing some images, I could assign that in them in the future. When I just get some open time, I might come back and decide, hey, I'm going toe look at all the one set to evaluate I also have one set, two in progress in that way, if I started an image but I didn't have time to finish it, label it within progress. So then again, when I get some time and I want to work on some images, I could view all the images set two in progress I have also have one called print testing, which is one where I've gotten the image I think it's pretty close to done and it's printed and hung on my wall somewhere uh and it's one of those where I walked by and I take a actually a sharpie marker and I mark it up whenever I see something I don't like and then I come back and make changes to it and make another print put it back on the wall and on lee after that prince been sitting on the wall for a week and I haven't market at all, so I think it's done and I have one of these labels also was that done so that way by setting up these I can choose their names in my preferences and here under labels to get to preferences I went to the bridge menu that's right find preferences if I'm in windows it would be under the edit menu instead and it's under labels so I can put in any kind of these levels I want so I might come in here and just say set up something like that and therefore I find it much easier to find my images once you want to find your images let's say you've selected then one I want to evaluate this one in the future decide if it's worth uh working on now if they go to the label menu you'll see it set up the way I did it my preferences and so I could say let's evaluate this image in the future and I'll go to other images he better here and this one instead has done so I can label it if I've done that to a number of images then if I want to find those in the future there's a bunch of different ways you can do it but one of them is in the bottom left of my screen but the bottom left I'm going to find a tab called filter and if I click on the filter tab this will allow me to limit the number of images I'm looking at based on certain filters I could turn on and if you look at those at the very top you aren't going to find the choice of label and so here it's going toe evaluate all the images in this folder I'm looking at it tells me there's one hundred of them with no label it all there's one of a mark done there's two of them marked evaluate and if I want to only view those I just click on the name that's their song click on that evaluate now it's all in dealing click on done and that's all I got and so it's a nice way where if I know I'm gonna have a little bit of time and I've marked my images with either evaluate or in progress or something else I just navigate to the folder I feel like working on and then I can say show me all the ones I should evaluate or all the ones I'm done I'm looking to make a slide show maybe something like that below that you'll also find the ratings so if you applied the star rating system you can come in there and also narrowed down to just those there's a bunch of other things in here you're welcome to pursue you can have it show you on ly the ones shot with a particular lens so let's say you know you need one that was a wide angle shot of wedding or something you could go over here to focal length it a list every single focal length that was used with in this folder and you could come in there and say show me only the ones shot with fifteen millimeter um if you continue to click I can also say just to get me and my my my wide angle shots when I just select all these really low numbers for wide angle lenses so percy that I'm not going to go through every option that's in there you're welcome toe look there and see what other things you can filter things by. But all it means in general is limit the number of images we're looking at based on the criteria that you've chosen within this list. If you've turned on a bunch of things in here, you just click on it to toggle it on and off. Just click a second time, you'll turn it off, but let's say I had five or six things in here. I want the things that were five stars, mark done and shot with a wide angle lens and shot on this date. You could do that kind of stuff with this. Well, I wouldn't want to go through the whole list and click again to turn things off, to get back to normal. So at the very bottom right there's a little no symbol and that just shuts off. Um, down there, I can clear the filter. Many make it show me all the images. One thing to look out for in this is if you switch folders it's going to turn those off on you. So if you're looking to make a slide show and you're going to be looking at multiple folders and when you're looking at your folders, you say, hey, show me only things that air force start above that kind of thing you switch between folders and suddenly it's not filtering anymore, so there is an icon at the bottom left this guy looks like a little thumbtack, and if you turn that on, it means keep these filters active even when I switched folders that way, I could click between a bunch of folders and see all the ones that are marked done on our four stars or above. Otherwise, if I don't know about that little icon that looks like a thumb tack, then I'm gonna have to sit there and click on my filters every single time a switch, a folder so it's really nice to know that the thumbtack means keep those things going, even if I switch folders. So in general, we have far folders here that I'm going to navigate if I wanted further organize my images, we had our collections where you could drag things into those particular collections, which are virtual folders, which means don't move the stuff on my hard drive just remember where it isthe let me see it later and then another way to further narrow things down would be to use ratings or labels and it's under the filter tab where you can limit but you're feeling so that's all you see so when you found the image you want to work with, all you need to do to open it and photo shop is double click on its name and it'll open and photoshopped when you're in photoshopping you're done with the image, you can close it same way close any file asshole ex in the corner and if I want to get back to bridge, I could manually switch to bridge the same way you switched to any program on your operating system or in photo shop under the file menu you'll find a choice just called browsing fish that would bring you back there so general questions about the things we've done in bridge which is moving files around remember hold on the option key alton windows to move a copy, changing the name by clicking on it and hitting tab to go between them in organizing them using ratings and collections uh when you put on image into a collection are you changing any of the metadata making it searchable later? Also I don't believe you are I believe it's I don't know for certain I'd have to look too teo investigate, but as far as they know it's internally within bridge where it's containing a little database that's just saying hey, what files have you dragged into any particular collection but I haven't investigated that to absolutely confirm that there's no meta data change I don't think there is on door the keyboard shortcuts you've shown for bridge do they work for light room as well? Now they're a little bit different some of them are the same for instance I think hitting space bar in light room we'll show you full screen hitting um but enbridge it will be different and in fact I find that when I teach photoshopping his bridge when I'm at home, I use light room and I am often typing bridge keyboard shortcuts in light room in some of them work but not all of them all right? So you be careful there if you switch back and forth even if I still own light room I do use bridge I use bridge when I need to look at other people's files files and I'm not going to need to see in the future I need to see him just right now like somebody gives me a stick driver something I wanted to see what's on it and I don't want to deal with those images later on so I don't want to import them in my light room catalog and so I'll just use bridge in those cases way have questions online of course then so let's start we're going to go back exhorted to the beginning and sean scott smith had asked I have my content on the right and the preview in the center on dh center images. The center images don't always seem sharp. Would that be because my preview is too large and then similarly, adam ansel said, our previews and big bridge of reduced quality mine look soft when compared to one opened in photoshopped. Okay, you can control the previews. The main thing is what is showing you on screen here in bridges, just trying to show to you quickly, because if it showed you a full size preview of every image, it would have to open every single picture to generate that preview. And so there are different settings you can use for previews. One of the places where you can change that is just above the thumbnails or two icons. Let me show you where they are. Do you see these two icons here that look kind of like checkerboards? One of the problems with bridge is sometimes you pointed out a folder that you freshly shot you just put your card from your camera and your computer copied over the images, and now you want to view him and it seems like bridge takes a while to show you all the images that's because I believe with default settings it's crying, trying to create relatively high quality previews. In order to generate those previous, it needs to open your files, scale it down to whatever size previ it wants to make and save it in what's, known as a cash cash, is just a temporary storage spot, and if I click on the icon, is the left of these two if you want to see what it does, just hover over it without clicking on it, just hover over an icon pause and its house you browse quickly, we're by preferring embedded images. That means if your camera attached a thumbnail image to this image when it was shot in, most cameras do that, it can just show you those right away and it's going to show your images much faster when you show it a folder it's never looked at before so that's one thing right there, so if you have that turned on right now and you're saying your previous don't look very good that's. Why? Because the previous that your camera attached are relatively small, low resolution, they load fast and nice, but they don't look the best, and so that might be turned on for some of the people. If I turn that off, the icon next to it is actually a drop down menu in photo shop and enbridge, anytime you see a triangle next to it, it means there's, a menu hidden there sometimes the triangle is really big like this one here sometimes it's medium size like this one here in sometimes it's tiny like this one here and they can even get smaller than that photo shop it usually means there's a menu, so if I click on this one and hold down here I can tell it how to think and so for those that are getting low quality previous that just don't look very good, you might have these set to embedded or one of the other choices that could influence it. If you want this to truly match what's in photo shop, you'd have to have it generate one hundred percent previews that would take a bit of time for to generate and it takes up space on your hard drive where has to store them? S o it's not always the most ideal, but those are the areas red look for those thank you, ben I guess one of the questions that I have to follow up on that is if you can't see how sharp the actual image is and is this not a good place than to try to be deciding between several images that might be the same? There are ways to get it to show you how sharp things aren't here's one of them let's say I have this preview this here if I want to check sharpness because let's say you're shooting people if their eyes or out of focus, you might as well throw the picture away. Well, I can move my mouse on top of this preview and click on it if I click on it. It's going to zoom up two hundred percent view and I can actually drag this around my image to check various areas to see if their sharp in that might take a moment for to generate it. It might sit there and look kind of j g and then suddenly appear sharp, but all I did is clique within the preview, and you'll find there's a little x in the lower right here. And that means close that preview. Yeah, so if you want to check your preview that's one, check your focus that's one way to do it. Okay, so many want to take another question before we move on. Sure, all right, there's. So many questions about, you know, the advantages of disadvantages of bridge versus light room, but I will be more specific, and I can't answer that first without even getting the detail. Yeah, yeah, ok, if you own light room and you work on your own photographs completely replace bridge with light room period unless you're viewing someone else's files that you never need to look at in the future. Meaning you don't want to import them into your catalog in light room you just want a glance at him because somebody wants to show you their pictures and then they're going to go away and you never want to see those pictures again that's when I use bridge otherwise replace bridge with light room period but now you can give me the detail if you want a well that that answer was from for stacy spits nolan who had asked a question on facebook about that hopefully that answered stacy's question on dh then a question came in from michael s if you make changes in bridge name changes, key words, et cetera will those changes also be available in light room? Any changes you make here will be made on your hard drive and so if you have yet to import those images in the light room, then when you import them yes it will be shown in light room if you've already imported them in a light room and then you make changes light room might suddenly say that those images are can't be found and that's because they had a different file name before you've changed them and it doesn't know that that change in file name relates to the originals and so in light room if you make changes, you might suddenly see a little question mark icon next to any particular file that you've changed the name on you can right click I believe on the file and they'll be a choice of find original and you could pointed at the newly named one or if what you've done is add images to a folder using bridge and now you're in light room and you don't see the images there you can right click on the folder and there's a choice called synchronize folder synchronize folder means look for what's different in that folder than what I currently have if there's any files I'm missing important men if there's any files have been deleted removed them from light room and so depends on what you're doing well, there's been quite a few questions that have come up, so I hopefully that clarifies that for everyone as far as the light room bridge situation good answer cheryl in new mexico says how would you get rid of those malley flowers smart collection if you wanted to clean up your bridge content content all have toe look, I'm used to working on my own hard drive where I can easily get to thinks was my folder structure stays relatively consistent, I'll have to look during a break that I'm just not something I'm used to dealing with, right? So I'll do that a couple other quick things before we get out of bridge that air somewhat essential if you have any images and you need to rotate them because they're sideways or anything, they're just some icons above these two right here for rotation. Um, and if you like using your keyboard instead, you can do command, which is controlling windows, and then the bracket keys there like the little half square things for rotation. Also, sometimes, when you're browsing your images, you'll find that this area where the thumbnails are just takes up too little of space takes it too long to look through a large folder of images. So there are two things that can help you to look at a large number of images. The first one is you can hide the side panels temporarily by pressing the tab key that same key works and photoshopped. If you want to hide the panels that are there, like layers and the tool panel and all that you just hit town when they go away, hit tab a second time and they come back so tab this means just show me the middle of area of bridge, hide the sides, then one special thing is you can make it so all you see are your thumbnails. You don't see the filings because oftentimes the file names don't really matter to you. Instead, it's just the visual of your image, and to do that you can come under the view menu, you'll find a choice of show thumbnail only I never do it from the menu I just use a keyboard shortcut for it because I find it easy to remember and that is command tea for thumbnail control team windows so if I type that all the file names go away, type it again it comes back in that way I can see a large number of images because I've gotten rid of the side panels and I've gotten rid of the names below them so tab for your panel's command tea for file names or not thumbnails only or not then a final final thing is sometimes you have weird file formats in a folder you have a file format you don't usually open and photo shop you want to open it in another program you have pdf files or something else and enbridge when you double click on it there's going to be a default setting that tells us what program to open it in and that's where it's always going to go to and sometimes you want that default to be different. For instance with a pdf file it usually tries to open it an acrobat. Maybe you prefer it to open in a program called preview because that's just what you're used to if that's the case, let me show you where you change that you go to your preferences on a mac would be under the bridge menu on windows and being the edit menu and in your preferences is a section called file type associations and all it's going to do it on the left side of this list are all the file formats that bridge can show you and you need to find the file format that you're thinking about. So in my case I was talking about pdf and so if I scroll through this live it's going to be there be under acrobat or probably portable document format, but in general scroll through the list until you find the particular file format that you're thinking about and once you find it over on the right side, you can choose which file or I should say what program you would like each one of those file formats to open in its default. So if you had any weird files and they happen to be listed within this list and you hate that when you double click on it that it opens in the program that you don't like that, all you need to do is scroll down this for instance here's encapsulated postscript and it wants to open him in illustrator maybe I don't don't use illustrator and I would like to instead open and photo shop you can do that for any file format that bridge is capable of dealing with just really nice to know that exists otherwise it could be frustrated every time you double click on a weird file

Class Materials

bonus material

Fundamentals Resource.zip
Practice Images.zip

Ratings and Reviews

dennis hartman
 

Great teacher. The course is great even if CS6 seems hard to work on. I brought up my CS6 and did on it what he was teaching. What a learning curve. He made it fairly easy. Thanks for the great help.

a Creativelive Student
 

I have been learning by video for months but nobody ever explained the why to me. Knowing the why makes all the difference. It helps me remember so much better. As a teacher, I need to remember that. Thanks Ben.

agcphoto
 

I wasn't sure how useful I thought this session would be, but, by the time the middle of the second day arrived, I bought the course and the rest of the series as well. Thank you very much Ben Willmore.

Student Work

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