Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [241]
Configuring the General preferences
First things first, let's go to the Bridge preferences (located in the Edit menu in Windows and the Bridge menu in Mac OS X) and look at the General settings. These govern the Bridge interface appearance and basic behavior. The first section contains the Appearance controls where you can adjust the general user interface brightness and below that the brightness for the image Content and Preview panel areas. These are normally set quite light and my preference is to make both a little darker (the Figure 11.1 settings were used to capture most of the screen shots seen in this chapter). The Accent Color menu offers a range of color options for accentuating the image highlighting and Bridge menu items. You'll also note how the Default color switches between orange and blue, depending on the User Interface Brightness setting.
Figure 11.1 The Bridge General preferences.
The Behavior section let's you make Adobe Photo Downloader launch by default whenever a new camera card is inserted (or if the camera is connected to the computer directly). The ‘Doubleclick Edits Camera Raw settings in Bridge’ option allows you to override the default behavior and forces Bridge to be the program that always hosts the Camera Raw plug-in. The ‘ -click Opens the Loupe When Previewing or Reviewing’ option applies to the Preview panel and Review modes so that the loupe only shows when the key is held down. Meanwhile, the Bridge program maintains a list of the most recently visited folders to enable fast and easy access. The default number is 10, but you can increase this number if you want. The Favorite Items section contains checkboxes that allow you to select which items you want to see appear listed in the Favorites panel (see Figure 11.30) and lastly, the Reset button, which can be used to reset all the alert warning dialogs in Bridge.
Open anything
Most files can be opened via Bridge. Well, almost anything. You can think of Bridge as being like an advanced file navigation dialog for all the programs in the Adobe Creative Suite, although you are not just limited to opening CS5 Creative Suite documents. For example, you can also open things like Word files in the Word program via Bridge, plus you can drag and drop documents from the Bridge window to an external folder or vice versa.
Launching Bridge
There are several ways you can launch Bridge. The most direct method is to click on the Bridge button in the Photoshop CS5 Application bar (Figure 11.2). Clicking this button launches Bridge and opens the Bridge window shown in Figure 11.3 and whenever you launch Bridge it always displays the contents of the folder you last visited. You can also launch Bridge by going to the File menu in Photoshop and choosing ‘Browse in Bridge…’. Or, you can use the or shortcuts. Note here that both these commands can also be used when you wish to go from Bridge back to Photoshop. To open an image from Bridge, simply double-click a thumbnail or press the or key and the image will open directly in Photoshop. If you want the Bridge window to close as you open the image, then simply hold down the key as you double-click. Now, if you refer back to Chapter 3, you will remember how opening Camera Raw files will vary depending on how the Camera Raw preferences have been configured. When you double-click on a raw image file thumbnail, or multiple thumbnails in Bridge, this normally opens the raw images via the Adobe Camera Raw dialog hosted by Photoshop, and if you go to the File menu in Bridge and choose ‘Open in Camera Raw…’ ( ) the images open via the Camera Raw dialog hosted by Bridge. The subtle distinctions between which application hosts Adobe Camera Raw are elaborated on further in Chapter 3 (and also in the sidebar on the left), but essentially a double-click opens a raw file via Camera Raw in Photoshop, and if you hold down the key as you double-click, you can open a raw image bypassing the Camera Raw dialog completely.