Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [265]
Mini Bridge
Bridge has been around for a number of years now and it does therefore surprise me to still see people struggling to locate their Photoshop files via the Finder or Explorer. I have even sat through Photoshop seminars where the instructor has preferred to use the system Finder, when Bridge would have been the obvious choice for grouping demo files together in the correct order and making them easy to locate. So why aren't people using Bridge? Part of the reason might be because there are now better catalog management programs available such as Expression Media or Lightroom. As I said earlier, I mainly use Lightroom to manage all my photos, but I do still use Bridge on an almost daily basis to manage big projects, such as this book, or run Photoshop demos. If some Photoshop users aren't taking to Bridge is it because the program is now rather complex? It was perhaps for this reason that Adobe decided to create Mini Bridge, which is essentially an Adobe AIR™ Extension panel that is as easy to access as any other panel in Photoshop.
The Mini Bridge interface
To access Mini Bridge, you can go to the Window menu and choose Extensions Mini Bridge. Or, click on the Mini Bridge button in the Photoshop Application bar (Figure 11.76). This opens Mini Bridge in the Home view mode shown in Figure 11.77. If you want to start browsing straight away you can do so by clicking on the Browse Files button, but bear in mind that in order to do so you'll also need to have the main Bridge program running at the same time in the background. This is because Mini Bridge is working in tandem with Bridge. First though, let's look at the other options shown here, starting with the Settings button.
Figure 11.76 Mini Bridge can be launched by clicking on the Mini Bridge icon in the Photoshop Application bar.
This opens the Settings view seen at the top of Figure 11.78, where you can click on the settings buttons shown here to configure the Mini Bridge preferences. The middle screen shot shows the Bridge Launching preferences, where you can choose how you wish Mini Bridge to interact with the main Bridge program. The bottom screen shot shows the Appearance settings options where you can adjust both the interface and image backdrop brightness. For example, the interface screen shots shown here were all captured using a darkened User Interface Brightness setting. You'll notice that the ‘Color Manage Panel’ option is checked by default. By switching this off you can get faster drawing performance, but at the expense of less accurate color previews. Basically, I advise you not to uncheck this. Any time you want to restore the original settings you can click on the Reset Preferences button in the Settings section.
Figure 11.78 This shows the Settings view mode, the Bridge Launching settings and Appearance settings.
Going back to the Home panel view in Figure 11.77, if you select the ‘About’ option from the Mini Bridge panel menu, this simply tells you which version you are using, while clicking the Browse Files button takes you to the main Browse view shown in Figure 11.79. If you click on the Panel view menu (circled) this allows you to modify the Content pod appearance. Here, you can turn the Path Bar visibility on or off as well as the Navigation and Preview pods.
Figure 11.77 Here is the Mini Bridge panel showing the Home view and Mini Bridge options menu.
View options
At the bottom of the Mini Bridge panel (Figure 11.80) we have the zoom controls, where the thumbnail zoom slider adjusts the thumbnail/icon size in the Content pod area. The default view for the Content pod displays the thumbnails within an invisible cell grid and this allows you to manually reorder the thumbnails by clicking and dragging. On the right are the Preview (Figure 11.81) and View menus.