Introduction - Part 1

Macho Makeover

Downloading Image Workspace and Preferences in Bridge and Photoshop CS3 by Mama Shan 2007

Hi! This is Mama Shan with another video tutorial to kick off our Macho Makeover Series. I provided a link for you to download this image if you will look in the about this video section over here, expand that triangle and click on the Link for the Joe image. You can copy and paste it into your browser window or click on the link. Now once you do that, you will go to this page which will present you with the terms of use Dialogue box. If you agree to these terms, click Okay to download the image. And that will take you to this page, and click on the joe.ziplink. When you click on that, it will download to your desktop if that is your default area, and we will come out here to the desktop. You see that it is downloaded.

If you are on a PC, you will right click on this Zipper Folder, and choose the Extract All Command. If you are on a Macintosh, the folder will look like a white piece of paper with a Zipper up the middle. You can just double click on it if you are on a Mac and it will unarchive and create a new folder just as this procedure will do. And I am just clicking next on these dialogue boxes, and you can see that it has created another folder with the same name but without zip extension, and there is no graphic of a Zipper on it. So you can actually delete the Zip Folder at this point and your image is inside of this folder and that is what you want to use to open up in Photoshop.

While the focus of this series of videos is on a male makeover, you might want to reference the rembrant lighting set up video if you want to use one of your images. But I would suggest downloading this image to go along with the video. I will be covering some pretty basic things for beginners out there, focusing on a few areas of the interface of Bridge, as well as Photoshop.

Right now, this is the Default setup in Photoshop. If your interface does not look like this, you can just go to Window, and go to Workspace, and over here to default Workspace. And it will setup your Workspace to look just like this in CS3.

Now I am assuming you have downloaded the image, I am going to close this image out and we are going to switch over to the Bridge Interface. Bridge is a separate program outside of Photoshop but it is a file browser and gives you a graphical representation and you can determine the size of the representation as well as being able to look at other particular information about the file before you open it. So it is a very rich application to view and locate your files.

You can access Bridge by clicking this thumbnail in the upper right corner over here or File and Browse. Either one is going to open up the Bridge Interface. Now if you Interface does not look exactly like mine, as far as the layout here of these various panels that you see, you can go under Window, Workspace, and reset to default workspace. Now, it gives you the layout of the default workspace but it may not give you the colors. So I am going to go into the Preferences area for Bridge. So using the Bridge Edit Menu, come down to Preferences. And I am working on windows. So if you are on a Mac, I am not sure if the preference for Bridge is actually under the Edit Menu, or under the Bridge Menu.

On Macintosh, Photoshop shifts with two extra menu items in these areas. For the Photoshop Interface, you will have a Top Menu Item of your called Photoshop and in Bridge, it will say Bridge. So this particular menu item maybe under that. I am going to click on the General Tab here, and under Appearance, use you Interface Brightness. I have mine set to white. If you click the slider and move it back, you can make it completely black or various shades of gray. I like mine white.

The image Backdrop Area which is here, and here, I can change that to white or black, and I like it a dark gray. The favorite items down here, I have mine all checked, and that will make it so that when you look under the favorites tab in this panel, that those things are listed there.

Another thing that I want to mention is this File Type Association. And we are going to come back to that in a second here. So I am just going to click Cancel out of here, and I am going to open up the Image on the desktop where you downloaded it. This is the last folder I was in, and that was the image I had opened up for my tuts in progress folder which by the way if you click this little down arrow, it gives you the hierarchy of the nested folders, so that you know where they are located. Inside of my documents, inside of my pictures, inside of mamatuts, and tuts in progress is the current folder. So I can quickly jump other folders through this area here.

So I am going to actually click on my desktop icon here, and go into the folder that I unzipped. I am just going to click once on this thumbnail here. By the way, if you look at the bottom of Bridge, there is this little slider, if you want to increase the size of your thumbnails, you can do that through this slider.

But what I am interested in is the metadata of the image and there is a little scroll bar here. We are going to scroll it all the way to the top. Under File Properties which is one of the first ones, let me collapse all of these so you can see them all. What we are interested in is File Properties and the EXIF data. So first File Properties, this will give you the file name and document type; jpeg file, and the create dates and modify dates and the File Size.

I want to focus on the File Size here and just have you remember that because I want to show you something once we get into Photoshop. So this is a 1.2 megabyte file, which means, it is taking up 1.2 megabytes on your hard drive. It gives you the dimensions of the file, the resolution of the file, and the color mode.

Now let us scroll down here to the EXIF data, and it tells you the exposure of the image on the digital camera, the modes, the ISO rating, the focal length, etc. Flash says did not fire, we know that I used the flash in this but they were strobes studio flash, not the flash on the camera. So this bit of information is just telling you that the on camera flash did not fire. Also it gives you the white balance, light source, it says cloudy weather. That is a preset on the camera called Cloudy Weather. I did not make it custom. Temperature balance or white balance on the picture and we just scroll down here, it gives you the Copyright Information and the type of camera.

In the Interface, you can change the size of these windows by clicking on the boarders in between the panels, these little hash marks designate that they can be resized, over here. And, I am going to also show you another aspect about Bridge. Now this is the location for this. Notice when you hover over it, this yellow box opens up and gives you a whole bunch of information. But if I wanted to go back to the previous folder, this area will take me directly there. And I want to go there for a minute. I will click back again, and come back into this folder here. And I want to open up this PNG File. That is a Portable Network Graphics File. It is another file type, it is 24 bit and I am going to show you what happens when I double click on this. It opens up in another program called Fireworks. And I am going to close this out. If I want my PNG files to open up in Photoshop, I need to reassociate the file type. And you can do this through Bridge. Whether you have a jpeg image, a gif image, PNG image, whatever. And if you are double clicking on the thumbnail, or it is not opening up Photoshop when you double click on it, you can change that file type association through Bridge.

So if I want my PNG to open up the Photoshop program, I need to reassociate it. So we will go under Edit, Preferences again. In Bridge this is not Photoshop, this is Bridge, and click down here on file type associations. And so you will find the file type down here, notice how it is listing all these other ones and what applications they are set to open. I am going to come down here to PNG, right here, click on this arrow, and reassosciate it to open up