November 13, 2009 by admin
We’ve seen that Adobe Bridge is a very powerful tool for managing many types of files, but with Creative Suite documents, and Camera Raw files, the Bridge is outstanding. This power comes at a cost in terms of system loading, though, and Adobe’s developers realized that not all systems are state of the art, blazing fast systems with unlimited memory. For that reason, they have added some ability to control Bridge’s on-the-fly performance and throttle back some of the processing power demanded, for those occasions when your system (or your patience) just isn’t up to it. One of the ways this is done is by controlling the display of thumbnails in the Content window.
Unfortunately, these settings frequently confuse new Bridge users. I’ll look at this problem and offer some solutions and pointers for taking control of Bridge’s display of thumbnails, and making it work for you.
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October 20, 2009 by admin
One of the most frequently asked questions regarding Adobe Bridge CS4 is, “What happened to Contact Sheets?” They are no longer available as a script, although the Contact Sheet II, Picture Package, and other “missing” scripts are still available for download (Mac). In fact, if you ordered Photoshop CS4 in the box, you’ll find this and other scripts in the “Goodies” folder on the Content disk.
However, the reason these scripts aren’t installed by default, is that they’ve largely been replaced by Bridge’s new Output work space. With this work space, the Bridge developers have taken a hint from Lightroom’s Output Module, and have created an experience that, well, heads in that direction. As you’ll see, there is still room for improvement; but give the new work space a chance – it is certainly an improvement over the CS3 scripts, and I’m sure you’ll see many ways that it will help make you more productive.
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September 29, 2009 by admin
When you browse the internet, you create favorites within Safari, Firefox or Explorer, in order to give you a shortcut to sites that you visit frequently. Having these “favorites” saved and organized allows you to navigate quickly and easily to web sites you visit most often, without having to type long and cumbersome URLs into the address bar of the browser.
When you work with Adobe’s creative suite, and manage multiple projects on your computer, you can use Bridge CS4’s “favorites” feature in much the same way as you would create shortcuts in your browser. Bridge Favorites allows one-click navigation to all your commonly used file folders within your system.
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September 22, 2009 by admin
It’s Tuesday again, and around these parts that means it’s time for another tutorial. Today, we will continue our exploration of Bridge, which I’ve been calling the Swiss Army Knife of the Creative Suite. In this series, we’ve begun to enumerate the many ways that Bridge is oh, so much more than a file browser.
Today’s tour leads us to the many varieties of viewing, reviewing, and previewing that Bridge offers within its interface. As we’ll see, the options are many, although some of the capabilities are not quite obvious, if not downright cloaked in obscurity.
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September 15, 2009 by admin
Working with Adobe Bridge can be intrusive or annoying, as it takes up the full screen and you have to switch back and forth between Bridge and Photoshop, or Bridge and your other CS applications. You can make the Bridge window smaller, but you still have to switch back and forth, and the small Bridge window doesn’t show content the way you might like.
Not to worry! Apparently the Adobe developers noticed the same thing, and in Bridge CS4, they have introduced a solution: Compact Mode. Switching to Compact Mode in Bridge shrinks the window, but does oh, so much more. In compact mode, the side panels are hidden, and the interface becomes much more streamlined.
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September 8, 2009 by admin
Today we’ll look at yet another of the many great capabilities of Adobe Bridge, which I’ve dubbed the “Swiss Army Knife of the Creative Suite.”
In the user forums at the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, we get many questions from users who are trying to batch process multiple images. Typically, the object is to convert a bunch of images – from several files to several hundred files. The conversions may be oriented to a specific file type, such as TIFF or JPG, or to a specific size, such as a low res output for proofs, email or web thumbnails, or to perform a specific action such as sharpening or adding a watermark.
The first place people tend to look when confronted with these sorts of tasks is Photoshop’s Batch processing capability. While the Batch command will allow you to perform all these activities, there is an easier way already built into Photoshop – and it is available from Bridge. It is a script, called the Image Processor.
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September 1, 2009 by admin
I’ve mentioned that Bridge is the Swiss Army Knife of the Adobe Creative Suite. Today, we start to delve into some of the inner twists and workings of Bridge, and we’ll start to see how this is oh, so much more than a typical file browser. There are pleasant surprises lurking behind every corner of this amazing program!
This tip comes to us from the Adobe Creative Suite podcast, produced by Terry White (If you haven’t seen this podcast, you should – there are all kinds of episodes featuring all the different applications in the Creative Suite). In the episode I’ve linked, Terry talks about a technique for Adobe Bridge CS4, known as “folder cruising.” Really. It’s actually in the menu! This is such a cool tip I had to post it here. Read on to see what this excellent feature can do for us…
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August 24, 2009 by admin
Today we’re going to have a bit of a convergence.
This is the third part of an ongoing series of tutorials about working with metadata to add copyright data to your images. It is also the first in a series of explorations into the inner workings of Adobe Bridge, the “Swiss Army Knife” of the Adobe Creative Suite. In this exercise, we’ll look at various ways of using Bridge as a tool to modify and apply metadata to your images.
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August 13, 2009 by admin
In my role as moderator on the forums at the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, I read and field many questions on Photoshop, as well as other applications in Adobe’s Creative Suite. One thing I’ve noticed in the discussions and in the frequently asked questions, is that Adobe Bridge is highly underrated and often misunderstood. As one of the best applications money can buy (it’s FREE after all!) the reality is that Bridge has a monstrous set of capabilities, that all to often go untapped by the Photoshop user community at large.
Starting today, and over the next few weeks as a recurring series, I will be bringing you a look under the hood at what I consider the Swiss Army Knife of the Adobe Creative Suite. We’ll look at Bridge’s basic capabilities, as a file browser and launcher, but we’ll dig oh, so much deeper. In fact, if you stick with me, we’ll take the red pill (you do recall Adobe’s code name for CS3?) and we’ll see just how deep this rabbit hole goes!
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