Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [40]
Adobe Bridge CS5
Bridge (Figure 1.95) is designed to provide you with an integrated way to navigate through the folders on your computer and complete compatibility with all the other Creative Suite applications. The Bridge interface allows you to inspect images in a folder, make decisions about which ones you like best, rearrange them in the Content panel, hide the ones you don't like, and so on.
You can use Bridge to quickly review the images in a folder and open them up in Photoshop, while at a more advanced level, you can perform batch operations, share properties between files by synchronizing the metadata information, apply Camera Raw settings to a selection of images and use the Filter panel to fine-tune your image selections. It is very easy to switch back and forth between Photoshop and Bridge, and one of the key benefits of having Bridge operate as a separate program is that Photoshop isn't fighting with the processor whenever you use Bridge to perform these various tasks.
Return to Photoshop
Most of the time you will probably click on the Launch Bridge button in Photoshop to go to Bridge and, when you have selected an image to open, this will take you back to Photoshop again of course. But you can also toggle between the two programs by using to go from Photoshop to Bridge. Once in Bridge you can use the same keyboard shortcut to return to Photoshop again, although to be more precise, this shortcut always returns you to the last used application. So if you had just gone to Bridge via Illustrator, the shortcut will in this instance take you from Bridge back to Illustrator again.
The Bridge interface
Bridge can be accessed from Photoshop by choosing File Browse in Bridge… or by clicking on the Launch Bridge button circled in red in the Application bar in Figure 1.95 (you can also set the Photoshop preferences so that Bridge launches automatically as you launch Photoshop). Bridge initially opens a new window pointing to the last visited folder location. You can also have multiple Bridge windows open at once and this is useful if you want to manage files better by being able to drag them from one folder to another. Having multiple windows open also saves having to navigate back and forth between different folders. To make Bridge windows more manageable, you can click on the Switch to Compact mode button (circled in blue in Figures 1.95 and 1.96) to toggle shrinking/expanding a Bridge window.
Figure 1.96 If you click on the Switch to Compact mode button (circled in blue in Figure 1.95), this shrinks the Bridge window to a compact, Content panel only view like the one shown here, and if you click on the Ultra Compact mode button (circled here in red), this compacts the window further to display the title and Application bars only. To return to a full window view, click on the Switch to Full mode button (circled in blue). Note that compact Bridge windows are always displayed in front of all other windows on the display, even when you are working in another program.
Figure 1.95 The Bridge interface consists of three column zones used to contain the Bridge panel components. This allows you to customize the Bridge layout in any number of ways. For a complete overview of the components that make up the Bridge interface please refer to Chapter 11.
It makes sense to resize the Bridge window to fill the screen and if you have a dual monitor setup you can always have the Photoshop application window on the main display and the Bridge window (or windows) on the other. Image folders can be selected via the Folders or Favorites panels and the folder contents viewed in the content panel area as thumbnail images. When you click on a thumbnail, an enlarged view of the individually selected images can be seen in the Preview panel and images can be opened by double-clicking on the thumbnail. The main thing to be aware of is that you can have Bridge running alongside Photoshop without compromising Photoshop's performance and it is considered good practice to use Bridge in place of the