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Provides: Dynamic parsing of images and pages of all types but focused on the programs of the Creative Suite
Developer: Adobe
Requirements: Mac OS X v10.4.9
Retail Price: Free; comes with almost every Adobe product
Note: The following is a preview of beta software. That means this software was still in development and was not formally "completed." Thus, there may be changes in design, functionality, and performance from what will be shipped to the consumer.
Bridge grew out of Photoshop CS's File Browser and came onto its own in CS2. Now with the Adobe Suites 3, Bridge 2 provides greater depth to analyze and work with your photos as well as interact with the rest of the Suite. Since the release of Lightroom, there may be some question as to whether Bridge has any reason to be. However, Lightroom is a self-contained program for working with full photo shoots done by photographers. Bridge is for use with Photoshop and as a "bridge" between Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, DreamWeaver, (and GoLive 9 when it is released).
There might be some who purchase a spot product (e.g., Dreamweaver, InDesign, whatever) and are somewhat flummoxed that Bridge was included and installed whether they wanted it. I will not deal with that issue. However, if you stop and take the time to explore Bridge, you will find that Bridge has much to offer and is a great tool for dealing with images, movies, and files. Not dealt with in this preview is that Bridge is also a portal to RAW images. That will come with a separate review.
When you purchase the entire Suite, probably the biggest hidden power of Bridge is that it maintains color control throughout all of the programs that can support control (web programs like DreamWeaver and GoLive do not support color profiles). From the Edit menu, one can select "Creative Suite Color Settings..." and by selecting it in this one location, all programs are in sync. If you purchase, for example, Photoshop and InDesign separately, you will receive a copy (two, actually) of Bridge, but this automatic color space syncing will not be available.
When you open Bridge 2 for the first time, you will be struck with the new charcoal darkness. This can be adjusted in the Preferences and can be scaled to whatever shade of gray you want. Unfortunately, all changes are visual, there is no numerical feedback for any given percent of gray. Like Bridge 1, all palettes are self-contained and cannot be dragged beyond the range of the Bridge window. There are more palettes with Bridge 2 and a variety of changes to the user interface.
Starting CCW from the bottom left, one can see the double arrows to trigger displaying the outer two panels for holding palettes (Bridge 1 had one side panel). Also displayed is the number of files in any given folder. The size slider has been improved considerably as now when you click the larger or smaller rectangles, rather than jumping to the max or minimum size, the thumbnail jumps to the next larger size that fits the icon. Thus, if I were to click the larger icon in the above view, the thumbnail would jump from two thumbnails wide to one thumbnail wide, and that would be the largest thumbnail that could fit in that space. Similarly, if I had clicked on the smaller rectangle, I'd have three thumbnails wide and they would be the largest that could fit in that space.
To the right of the size slider are three buttons for selecting workspaces, (each cleverly named "1," "2," and "3"). This was a good idea on Adobe's part because these buttons are user customizable. If you mouse-down on these buttons, you'll see you can select what action each button performs. Notice that you also have access to any workspaces you may have created yourself. Drag down to your selection and subsequent clicks on the button automatically select your selection. Again, a major UI improvement.
As before, there is the Compact mode in the upper right to make a window that displays over any other program (or not, as set in the Preferences) letting you easily drag images from Bridge to all of the other Suite programs. You can delete items via the trash can, rotate as needed (images that are shot with cameras that have automatic sensors for Portrait and Landscape view will be recognized and will automatically show up in Bridge in the proper rotation and measurement aspect—again, another major feature). To the right of the rotation icons is a "New Folder" icon. You can back up to the parent folder of whatever you are looking at and, with the drop-down menu, select from either the Favorites palette (described below) or the past ten folders you've been working with. The left and right arrows are like Browser arrows that let you go back and forth from views.
Loading images into Bridge is done by simply dragging files of images onto the Bridge icon or in the Dock. Similarly, you can open from the favorites folder or via the Folder view. There are lots of ways to see your files.
For what it's worth, my workspace's general shape is seen below (albeit significantly shrunk in size to fit this column). By placing the Preview palette in the middle, I can let that palette be very large to show off the selected item in the Content Palette. Also, this allows me to easily show the Filter, Metadata, and Keywords palette on the lower left. Navigation is done in the upper left with either the Favorite or Folders palette.
This gives me all of the possible palettes and provides the Preview in the middle where it can be as large as I can make it to show off my images. The Preview palette is extensively changed as well. Now, if you click on multiple images, they all show up to make side-by-side comparisons as seen below (the image below was reduced in size to better display the features). The only limitation is that as you select 2, 3, 6, + images from the Content palette, the size of the images within the Preview palette is obviously going to decrease.
But wait, there's more. If you move your mouse over an image in the Preview palette, you will see a magnifying lens. If you click your mouse, a loupe will pop up letting you see the image at 100%. If your mouse has a scroll wheel, you can zoom in by sliding the wheel toward you. Maintaining your finger on the mouse button, you can drag the loupe tool around. If you are comparing two similar images, holding the Control key causes the loupes to move together so you examine (slide around) both images at the same time. One tip: trying to get out of the loupe view can seem tricky if you don't know the secret handshake; you need to bring the cursor of the mouse (with your finger off the button) up to the pointy-part of the loupe tool. When you see the cursor arrow turn into a hand, click again and the loupe will shrink and disappear
Back to the Contents palette, there's one particular new function that will please many: Stacks. If you take photos like I do, there may be a full burst of photos of one subject and/or view. As you are looking over your images, it can be a bit tricky to separate these multiple images of the same view from the rest of the images. Now, when you make active a series of images and do a contextual menu of them, you have a new option: Group as Stack.
Once selected, this set is grouped into a Stack and can be considered a set. By clicking on the "number" on the images in the set, you can expand the images and re-clicking on the number can restack the stack.
The Metadata palette has extensively been updated to display quick data observations and as much detailed information as you want. Also note the top view that is designed to display your data as on a camera.
Keywords have been expanded and provide a fast way to retrieve your images. You can create new keywords on the fly, and any images that are selected in the Contents palette will receive the keyword Metadata when the box is checked.
Finding images is simply an issue of a contextual menu on the particular keyword you are interested in finding. You can expand searches by clicking on the "+" symbol and expanding the search as needed.
However, the fastest way to filter your images is via the Filters palette. Instead of the drop-down menu along the top of Bridge's window, the new filter palette provides powerful easy-accessed boolean control on the images of any folder.
Before I explain the boolean aspect of the Filter's palette, let me explain the somewhat obtuse little icon in the upper left as seen below. It's a folder with an international negate sign overlaid in the bottom left corner. When you click this, any folder within a folder becomes irrelevant. That is, if you have Folder A containing 50 images and Folders B & C (each containing 50 images). When you click this icon, you will be dealing with all 150 images in the same window. Clicking the icon again brings you back to the folder-centric view of the images.
The wonderful powers of the filter menu all focus on which selection(s) you have clicked on. As seen above, I've clicked on all of the images that were modified on 6/10/06 and are landscape images. As you can see on the bottom of the palette, there are only 8 images that satisfy that criteria from the 68 images in the folder. By clicking, shift-clicking, and/or control-clicking these various self-generated criteria, you can drive into any collection and find a specific image within any folder with ease. Also, as you can see, any keywords that have been generated for the selected images will automatically show up in this window. This is powerful and cool. Note also along the bottom of the palette's list are three ISO speed listings. Most camera settings automatically become a filter listing.
The Folder's palette is pretty much the same as it was in Bridge 1. You are presented with a view of the folder structure in your computer and you can click on any folder within to see the contents.
Bridge favorites is also fairly similar to what was in Bridge 1. One of the two new features is Start Meeting, which is part of Adobe Connect and lets you have meetings originating from your computer across the internet. As stated, there are extra fees for this. Also new is Bridge Home, and this is sort of a second generation ABC (the Adobe Bridge Center), but brought back to reality. The ABC was a big disappointment as it took forever to load and provided a lot of services that few wanted and/or felt they needed. Most people avoided it simply because it took so long to load.
In Favorites, you can drag your desired folders folders to the region below the Pictures folder below to create your own custom "it's always here" location for images.
Bridge Home is an extra training and information locator for all of Adobe's products. As seen in the reduced-sized view below, you can get support for any specific product or see what Adobe is "pushing" in the Home spotlight region. There are many hours of tutorials available from this new resource center. This does provide a good introduction of the new Adobe line. There's enough to get you started using all of the applications.
As stated earlier, Bridge is mostly intended for parsing of photos and images for use within the full Suite. Users of iView and other DAM (Digital Asset Management) programs may find the generation of thumbnails to be slow. There is a difference between these programs and Bridge, and that mostly has to do with what Bridge can provide that these other programs do not try: accurate thumbnails of the images.
Bridge has three ways of generating thumbnails, and the choice of which one to use is selected in the Preferences.
- From the information provided by the image. These are called "Quick Thumbnails" and generate very quickly. However, the quality of the thumbnails is not so great, no better than most DAMs.
- For quality thumbnails, you want to select "High Quality Thumbnails." These can take a long time to generate depending on the size number of the images to be generated.
- For compromise, there is "Convert To High Quality When Previewed." Thus, when you click on an image, a high quality thumbnail is generated at that time.
The reason for selecting any form of the HQ Thumbnails is to see accurate color and image quality in the thumbnail. Otherwise you are looking at an image's built-in JPEG view, which is of questionable quality. Nonetheless, one of the big problems with Bridge is that even after having cached an entire folder, some users will be frustrated over how long it takes for Bridge to re-cache the folder when returning to review images. Although caches are created of the images, a surprising number of operations require some level of reparsing the images for viewing.
Perhaps the last "big new feature" within Bridge is a Photo Downloader, as seen below (at 50% size). You can set preferences to open this window when a camera media card is detected either from a camera or from a card media reader. You can see the photos, and, if you wish, you can check which images you'd like to download. You can also specifically check which images you want to download by checking the image. Surprisingly, there are fewer and greater options than available from the Batch Rename function from Bridge, but you can provide a custom name with multiple variations on how a date will be suffixed onto the name. Besides selecting to which folder you want the images to be downloaded, you can also select an extra backup download location and backup to two places at once. Probably the best feature is that you can download and convert to a DNG (digital negative format) in one fell swoop. Lastly, you can automatically embed your name as the author and set the copywrite date into the Metadata during the download.
One of my disappointments with Bridge 2 is that nothing was done with the Slideshow functions. I was hoping for a floating window to control the action, as I am not one to remember a bunch of key-commands that I use rarely. Alas, something else to look forward to in Bridge 3.
Some people will not need Bridge, while others do not fully understand what it is and how to use it. Admittedly, Bridge is not a DAM program. If you want/need a DAM, consider either iView or Portfolio, both of which are fine programs. However, for rummaging through your photos, looking for a place to parse your images while they are on their way to Camera RAW, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, DreamWeaver, FireWorks, or even GoLive (yes there will be a new release, we just do not know when), when you really start to use Bridge, you will find it is the program you start first on your way to use everything and anything else.
In short, Bridge 2 is a worthy advance from Bridge 1. The best news is that Bridge 2 is free...or very expensive, depending upon which Suite or product you may chose to purchase to get it.
___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.
Tags: Reviews ď Graphics/Design ď Writing/Publishing ď
