Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [247]
One-click previews
With Bridge you can use the Spacebar to quickly preview an image at a full size on the display. Once you are in this full display screen preview mode, you can click with the mouse to enlarge a photo to 100%, click to return to the full screen view again and use the arrow keys to navigate to the next or previous photo. To return to the Bridge window, just click the Spacebar again. When it comes to picture review editing, one-click editing offers a speedy and more controllable alternative to the Slideshow view mode. You can navigate easily from one photo to the next and add ratings or labels as you edit. It's simple and very effective.
Figure 11.25.
If you select a document or image in Bridge and click the key, the above dialog warns that you are about to send the selected file or files to the Trash (Mac) or Recycle bin (PC).
Deleting contents
The key can be used to delete selected images. If you click or click on the Delete button ( ) in Bridge, this pops a dialog asking ‘are you sure you want to continue? Clicking ‘OK’ removes the thumbnail from the Bridge window and sends the original file to the Trash (Mac) or Recycle bin (PC). Even so, files won't be permanently deleted until you empty the contents of the Trash (Mac)/Recycle bin (PC) at the operating system level. If you use , rather than proceed to the delete message, this ‘marks’ an image with the word ‘Reject’ in red. You can then use the Filter panel to select the ‘mark as rejected’ images only and delete them as required. Note that when it comes to deleting folders via Bridge, you can only do so if they are empty.
Stacking images
You can use the Stack menu in Bridge to group files into stacks. In the screen shot steps shown opposite you can see an example of how selected files can be grouped in this way. To use this feature, select two or more files, go to the Stack menu and choose ‘Group as Stack’ ( ). This groups the images, indicating they are part of a stack with a number showing how many files are included in the stack. To ungroup images from a stack, use: . To expand a stack use and to collapse a stack again use . If you want to expand all stacks use and if you want to collapse all stacks use .
1.
Here, three thumbnails have been selected in the Content panel. To group these images into a stack, I used the shortcut.
2.
Here, you can see how the files were displayed in the Content panel area when the stack was expanded. For this step, I selected the best exposed image (the middle one in the group shown in Step 1) and chose Stacks Promote to Top of Stack. This made the selected file the key image used to identify all the images in the stack.
Auto-stacking
Earlier in Chapter 7 we looked at how to merge bracketed exposure images together and in Chapter 9 how to use Photomerge to blend overlapping image sequences to build panorama images. In Bridge you can use the Stacks Auto-Stack Panorama/HDR command (Figure 11.26) to auto-stack such images. The way this works is that Bridge scans the images in a selected folder and where it finds two or more images that have been shot within an 18-second time frame, makes these candidate photos for a panorama or Merge to HDR image set. Once it has done this, it further analyzes the images using Photoshop's auto-align technology. If a sequence of images overlap by 80% or less, these are logically assumed to be part of a panorama sequence. Where a sequence of images overlap by 80% or more and the EXIF data shows that the exposure values are changing by one or more stops, these are assumed to be part of a Merge to HDR pro set. Using this logic, Bridge is then able to organize photos into stacks and at the same time, create and store metadata information that can be used later by Bridge to autoprocess the stacked images either as panoramas or as Merge to HDR sets (Figure 11.27).
Figure 11.26 This shows the Stacks Auto-Stack Panorama/HDR