What is Adobe Bridge CS4?

Since its introduction with Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite (CS) 2, Bridge has grown, become more useful and quicker to operate. While selecting and opening images in Bridge CS2 was sluggish, using Bridge CS4 is nearly seamless with Photoshop. CS4 was reorganized to make Bridge more efficient and make it more useful to users.

Basics

Bridge started as the Browser in earlier editions of Photoshop and was spun off as a separate but integral program when Photoshop CS2 was released. Photographers used it more often as time went on, so the information presented within it got better organized. For example, Metadata was moved from the left to the right side of the Bridge window so that Filters and Collections could be broken out on the left.

Metadata

Metadata still is there and is accessed by selecting an image or a series of images. Metadata tells you such things as what camera was used for the shot, what the exposure was, what the shutter speed was, what the white balance was and other useful information. You also can edit the IPTC Core data such as who took the photo, where it was taken, what the copyright is and what rights are granted for use.

Filters

The Filter section on the lower left provides details about such things as how many images in the folder are portrait or landscape, when numbers of photos were created and modified, keywords and color profiles. It even will tell you the shutter speeds for different numbers of photos, for example, 45 images were shot at 1/60th of a second.

Display

If you give your best photos five stars (click "Label" then five stars), you can tell Bridge to show you just your best images (click the star at the upper right called Filter Items by Rating). You no longer can label by color in CS4.

Options

Bridge CS4 also gives you the option of rotating the images with two rotation buttons at the upper right, clockwise and counterclockwise. A new feature allows you to sort images by name, label, type, date and other information. You also can get images directly from a digital camera with the camera icon in the upper left and output images for the Web or as PDFs with the Output button at the right of the upper-left icons.

References

• Adobe Bridge CS4