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By Root 1775 0

11.51) was recently updated in Bridge CS4 and is now even smarter than before. To create a new collection, all you have to do is make a selection of images in Bridge and then click on the ‘Add new collection’ button in the Collections panel. Or, you can click on the ‘Add new collection’ button first to create a new collection and then drag the files to the collection. You see, with collections you are not limited to refining the images in single folders: you can drag images across from other folders in order to create a new group of images. In Figure 11.51 I highlighted the ‘Portfolio’ collection and, as the title suggests, this collection could be used to store images that have portfolio potential. To remove photos from a collection, you need to make a selection of the photos and then click on the Remove From Collection button (Figure 11.52). To delete a collection, select the collection in the Collections panel and then click the Delete button.

Figure 11.51 The Collections panel showing normal and smart collections.

Figure 11.52 To remove a file (or files) from a collection, click on the Remove From Collection button (circled).

Smart collections

As well as creating normal collections, you can also click on the Add New Smart collection button to open the Edit Smart Collection dialog shown in Figure 11.53, where you can choose the folder group to look in, followed by the various criteria to filter by. In this example, I filtered the images in the SouthWest trip folder to create a smart collection that only contained files with a two star rating or higher.

Figure 11.53 This shows the Edit Smart Collection dialog and below, the result that this smart collection setting produced.

Smart collection rules

The Criteria section can be used to add one or more file selection criteria and each item can have conditional rules. So for example, when you select ‘Document Type’, you can choose to filter according to whether files equal or don't equal this criteria. When the ‘Rating’ option is selected you can choose to filter according to whether files have the exact same rating, or the same and greater, etc. Next comes the Match section. If you select the ‘If any criteria are met’ option, this acts as an ‘AND’ sort function, where files are sorted according to whether they meet any one of the individual criteria. If the ‘If all criteria are met’ option is selected, this acts as an ‘OR’ sort function, where files are sorted according to whether they meet all the combined filter criteria.

Output to Web and PDF

Bridge CS4 saw a radical shake-up in the way Web Galleries and contact sheets could be generated via Bridge, and Bridge now has an Output workspace mode that includes Output and Output Preview panels. Not too much has been lost in this transition and there have been a few small improvements, although in my view the changes that were introduced were just a small step forward and there was a missed opportunity to make some really significant improvements to the Web and Contact sheet output.

Automatic sRGB conversions

Prior to Bridge CS4 you had to make sure that all the RGB source files were in the sRGB color space, otherwise the colors could look very different when viewed in a non-color managed web browser (i.e. just about all web browsers). The good news is that Bridge now automatically converts everything to sRGB.

To put Bridge into output mode, click on the Output workspace. This reveals the Output Preview and Output panels, where you can choose between the PDF and Web Gallery output options.

Web output

We'll start with the Web Gallery output, which can be used to process selected images and automatically generate all the HTML code that's needed to build a website complete with thumbnail images, individual gallery pages and navigable link buttons. This feature can save you many hours of repetitious work. Imagine you have a set of Photoshop images that need forwarding to a client or colleague. When you build a self-contained Web Gallery (such as in the example shown in Figure 11.54),