Creating stacks with Adobe Bridge

- Now since I'm unable to ship all of you a memory card to transfer I've actually taken a subset, as well as some down-sampled images, and put them together as a set of downloadable files, so you can follow along and practice. So hopefully you've downloaded the exercise files. In my case I've put them on my Desktop for easy access. To get started let's use Adobe Bridge to get things a bit organized. On my Desktop I'll open up the folder and I'm gonna start here with the first folder, which is labeled Getting Organized for Post Production. In this case there's a folder called Source. Now what you have here is a series of down-converted RAW files. I took all of the RAW files from my camera shooting that day and gave you all the good ones and some of the bad ones, just so we could practice getting organized. And I'm gonna share some strategies with you. While these are still RAW files, I converted to the DNG format and down-sized to only two megapixels. This way you can have a lot of images to get organized with. There's actually 956 photos here, so you can get as much practice as you want. Now to start I like to take a look at things in the list view, so I can get familiar with what I have. And I recommend you can actually bump up to the second one here. And what I can see here are the different files. Now one of the things to pay close attention to is the exposure compensation. Now you'll notice here with the exposure compensation I can see the actual brackets. Shooting four under, two under, zero exposure, two over exposed, four over exposed. Well, that's a series and what I'm looking to do is to get things organized a bit. So let's go back to icon view and it looks like it's five images across. So I'll adjust the size of the scale here until five images fit across. And in doing so it becomes really easy to actually see my panorama for this particular one. You'll notice here that we have one, two, three, four, five brackets, then we pan the camera and repeat those same five brackets. As I scroll down here it becomes pretty easy to see that first series. And it looks to me like it ends up right about there. So with that selected I'll simply click and then choose to group that into a stack, Group as Stack. Now to make it a little bit easier and to temporarily hide that I'm gonna label that as a Reject. And what we can now do is actually uncheck Show Reject Files. That's gonna hide it. Now later on we'll remove those labels. Looking at the next set here it looks more like a seven bracket set, so let's double-check. We've got four, and then two, and then it repeats. So these actually look to be bad. So I can select those here, because it looks like I did some test shoots and didn't need it, and let's simply move those to Trash. But now we'll check our series. Four, two, zero, two over, four over, then it repeats. Well, that looks like it's probably a five image set as well. And for this basement location that's exactly what it is. So I'll select that range, group it, come back up to the top here, and simply mark that as a Reject. There we go. And it's now hidden. And as I scroll through here it becomes easy to see the different series. In this case I was shooting with a lot of five bracket sets, so the ability to group here and then hide by making them Rejects makes it easy to check things. And what we're looking for is to see what's happening. Now in this case I didn't do any bracketing on this particular one, so I'll just select that entire range, press Cmd or Ctrl + G to group, and then hide that. This makes it simple for you to check things. Now as you go through the ability to adjust the size of the thumbnails and the width will make it easier for you to spot things. This is gonna allow you to easily find a bracketed series and group it together. The benefits of that grouping is it makes it easy to know which images belong together. So let's just simply hide that there. And with this next one it looks like I was doing a bit of experimentation. Well, that's because I was testing to find my different exposures. I didn't actually start things, rather I tried a different series of brackets to see what was necessary to capture the dynamic range of this location. So you see with those different bracketing options this comes in handy. And I shot these just for my own experience and to make sure I was comfortable with the location. So let's take all of those, and I now see that it's starting to pan, there's the initial panning, and so I look for where the first change occurs. And this seems to be the set here. So I'll take through there, group, and Reject. And now looking, I can see my series. Notice, by using the thumbnail width it becomes very easy to spot where the changes occur. The benefit of grouping and then hiding temporarily is it will make it easier as you decide to process those panos. Now in this case, a lot of different shots, and I'll often hold up my hand to indicate when I'm getting ready shoot. Earlier I was doing some test exposures just to see how everything was coming together. These here are definitely Rejects, so I'll just group them to get them out of the way and mark them as Rejects. Now looking at this next one it's pretty simple. I can go ahead and press the Spacebar to go full screen, and step through, and see my shot. Now in some cases for one reason or another I shot more than one exposure. For example, someone was getting cut off here on the building, so I waited until they cleared and shot it again. It's not abnormal for you to do this. So if you do find that you have more than one exposure for a particular bracket you can either leave it in place for now or decide to get rid of one and choose which one you're going to use. But in any case, these are all from the same set up. So having that gives us the ability to quickly group and then hide by using the Reject command. We're not actually rejecting, we're just hiding. Now this is when we got busted by the police and had to show them our permit, so I definitely don't need that one, so I'll move that to the Trash. But we can now see what's happening. Remember, the ability to scale up the sizes of your thumbnails will make it very easy to see your panorama. Now here's some our test shooting. That's when the crew was documenting what we were doing, so obviously as we were demonstrating things I don't need to see the crew in the shot, so none of these are gonna actually get used, but as we go down a little later we're starting to get into usable shots. Well, this becomes the ability to actually adjust these thumbnails and make some quick decisions. This shows you the striation of what's usable and not usable. And as I get down to the bottom here, same thing. So here's a grouping, Command + G. Here's some in-camera panoramas. I'm not gonna use those for now, so I'll just mark them as Rejects, and here's another grouping. Same idea. There's the building, the Lincoln Memorial, and that lines up nicely back over here with the start of that cycle. Now sometimes if it's low light conditions I might shoot a little bit more as I did here. So I can select those extra images and group them together. Alright, there's just a few images left. You can feel free to keep practicing on your own. Most of these that I have left here in the middle aren't actually usable, but by adjusting the size of the thumbnails it becomes easy to hide things. And remember, you can switch to a list view, making it easier to see your brackets. Once you're all done with the sorting, simply go back up to the top and uncheck hiding rejected files. Just say Show Reject Files. Now as you've done that it'll be a lot easier to find what you're working with. You'll notice all your groups. If you wanna get rid of those labels no problem. You could just press Command + A or Control + A for select all, and actually start to assign ratings or No Rating. This'll make it very easy to find things. Now you'll know that all of these images in a particular stack belong together. And in this case, you could start to move them into folders, making it easier to work. So I can go ahead and do things like make a New Folder here. File, New Folder, and call that _Shot 01. I'll copy that to my clipboard, there we have it. And we can simply take that up to the top there. You'll notice that it didn't alphabetize, because the file names have an underscore, so easy way around that, I'll just add a second underscore and it goes right to the top. Click to select that whole stack and drop it in. Make another folder, paste your name from before and change its name. Let's just add that second underscore, there we go, copy, grab that whole stack by clicking on the number, and drop it in. And you see that it gets organized. By using this ability to process each panorama into a stack and then putting it in its own unique folder you're gonna have a much easier time when it comes to staying organized during post-production.