Creating content using Assets Essentials

Transcript

In this video, we’ll showcase using Adobe asset essentials to create and manage new content. Asset essentials allows you to perform some lightweight manipulations and manage different versions for your content. As a marketer or designer, we won’t need to send out that company-wide email looking for the most up-to-date assets anymore. And we will have access to the previous versions, multiple sizes for different campaigns and more. In a previous video, we added some assets for our weekend adventures. This video is going to continue from where we left off. Let’s start by adding a new adventure to our adventures folder. Selecting add assets from within the adventures folder, allows me to drag and drop the Surf Camp in Costa Rica folder from my local machine and upload his contents. Before we select upload, it’s important to review the contents of a folder. The folder has the images I need, so let’s select upload to continue.

Once the assets have been uploaded and processed, we can preview them in our asset workspace. If you notice that one of the files is missing, or maybe we are given a new file to upload, we can actually drag and drop files directly to the asset workspace, to upload them. This opens up the upload file pop-over with a preview the same as before. We don’t have to press add assets every time, if we have everything already open in another window.

Next, I want to upload a new version of the surfing five image, because it has some black bars on the side of it. I have a new version on my local file system that does not have these black bars. By dragging and dropping the new version and selecting upload, the upload progress bar will display a warning that we have uploaded a duplicate file.

If we select the ellipsis three options appear, new version, replace and duplicate. Selecting new version will create a new version of this particular file. Meaning when we look at the files history, we will replace the older file with the newest version.

Replace, will replace the old file with the new one we just uploaded. This skips a versioning and is only recommended if you know the older file will never be used, because this option replaces the file’s versioning history and any associated metadata. Duplicate will keep both files, but give the new file a unique file name to differentiate it from our first file.

For this example, I want to create a new version, so let’s select new version.

Once the new version has finished processing, the preview will update and voila, no more black bars. Now that we have our new surf asset, let’s dig a little deeper and start to manipulate our assets within asset essentials, double-click into the asset and a preview mode opens with the asset’s information.

To the far right, we have a number of icons indicating the different actions we can take relative to the asset we selected. If this was a video asset, such as an MP4, some of the actions won’t be available. Because this is a compatible image asset, we can select the edit image icon, which will open up Adobe Photoshop express natively in asset essentials. To the left, we have the option to resize, crop and touch up the image. Selecting one of these options opens a sidebar to the right. The resize image option allows us to resize the image with pixels and percentage. The aspect ratio is by default locked to prevent the distortion of the image, and we are also given some guidelines for common sizes below. If we made some adjustments such as resizing our image, we can save this as a version by selecting, save as version in the top right corner. The crop and straightened tool allows us to rotate and flip our image. We also have a straightened slider to straighten the image and best of all, and aspect ratio crop tool. The aspect ratio tool has predefined sizes for various social media platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

If you’re feeling like having a bit more fun with your cropping, we can even select a shape. Selecting the heart and selecting crop, we can see that our image was cropped. Now, sometimes we might make a mistake.

As it turns out, management did not approve me making this into a heart shape, but no worries, we can just select undo. The touch-up tool, lets us make some minor touch-ups and we can adjust our brush size as needed. Lastly, the adjust image option provides some presets. Selecting the sliders icon allows us to drill in and adjust the filters applied one by one, or we can adjust them all by using the preset amount slider located on the preset itself. As we continue to make changes to the image, we can save each change as a version, allowing us to go back in time, if we want it to use different filters in the future.

Tapping the version icon located in the far right sidebar populates a version history of our file. We can see the date and time it was last updated as well as selecting different versions will change the preview. If we wanted to revert to a previous version, we can select that version and in the bottom right, select make latest version. This will update our selection, which is now set to be the latest or current version.

Next, let’s update some of the image assets by selecting the icon in the far right sidebar. Once selected, we are provided metadata with a basic, advanced and tags toggle. Note that not all metadata can be edited directly in this screen, such as the file name. We can however, rename the file, once we select it back in our asset workspace. Adding additional metadata, such as a title and descriptions helps with finding assets, our search tool queries on these metadata fields. And when managing hundreds, if not thousands of assets, metadata makes discoverability a simple task. Looking at the advanced and tags information, Adobe sensei has automatically tagged our image with smart tags, and we can add additional keywords. Like how a photo-shoot turned out using the advanced information’s tab. We are able to see the lens, make and model of the camera used to take a particular photo, if that data is available. This can include drone footage for these beautiful landscape shots.

You should now know how to utilize versions, create new assets and change the metadata of your assets. Thanks for watching. -