According to Adobe Systems Incorporated, Adobe Bridge is “a powerful, easy-to-use media manager for visual people, letting you easily organize, browse, locate and view creative assets.” Adobe Bridge is primarily for visual designers, photographers and other people who deal with a large number of digital visual files.

Creative Suite

1. Adobe markets its Bridge program primarily as part of its Creative Suite, which contains a number of design programs such as InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and Flash. Its name comes from the fact that it is meant to be a “bridge” linking these and other programs.

Availability

2. Adobe Bridge is not available as a standalone program. It comes either as part of Adobe Creative Suite or as an adjunct to the Adobe Photoshop program.

Basic Functions

3. The basic function of Adobe Bridge is to allow users to index, organize and easily search their images. The organizational interface is customizable.

Project Management

4. Adobe intends Bridge to be a program that streamlines and facilitates project management in a group environment. It works with Adobe Version Cue and Adobe Device Central to help various members of a team to easily access and manipulate communal assets and projects.

Similar Programs

5. Apple’s iPhoto program performs tasks similar to Adobe Bridge. However, iPhoto is designed to appeal to less tech-savvy users. Adobe Bridge has extensive manual functions that give the user lots of options, while iPhoto is more automated, allowing users to do as much as possible with very little expertise.

Up until the release of Adobe Photoshop CS4, you could make contact sheets directly in that program. When CS4 came out, the function was moved to Adobe Bridge CS4 so that it can be used with other Creative Suite programs such as Illustrator. The process got a little easier, too, and now the contact sheets can be saved as portable document format files or for the Web.

1. Open Adobe Bridge CS4 and go to a folder that contains the photos you want to include in your contact sheet. You can do this by using the navigation tool in the upper Toolbar that generally will have the word “Computer” under the Bridge icon. If you click this, your hard drives will appear in the main window of Bridge. Click the hard drive where your photos are stored, then find the folder you want and double-click it.
2. Step 2

   Switch modes in Bridge from the default “Essentials” to “Output.” This will change the window to the “Output” mode and give you a new set of tools in the right-hand palette set. Select “PDF” if it already is not selected as the default at the top of the “Output” tool set. This is the mode for a print of your contact sheet. The other option is “Web Gallery.” Beneath the “PDF” selection, are the “Template” options, such as “4*5 Contact Sheet” and “5*8 Contact Sheet.” Choose one of these. Next, choose the size of the paper you want to print to under “Document” and set up how many columns and rows and what size the thumbnails should be in “Layout.”

3. Step 3

   Choose the options for final output in the “Overlays” part of the palette. These typically will include the “File Name” and “Extension,” but you do not need to include these if you do not want them. Simply click the check box next to each to remove it. Then set the “Font,” “Style,” “Size” and “Color” of the text to accompany your images. Beneath “Overlays,” you can choose other options from “Playback” or add a “Watermark” to protect your images from theft. At the very bottom is “View PDF After Save.” If you want to see the contact sheet as a PDF immediately, check the box.

4. Step 4

   Choose the photos you want included in your contact sheet from the bottom of the main window in the section called Content. You can select contiguous images clicking the first one and then holding the shift key and clicking on the last one. To select non-contiguous images use the command key (Mac) or the alt key (Windows). They will appear in the main window. To see how your contact sheet will look, click the “Refresh Preview” button just under “Template” at the top of the right tool set.

5. Step 5

   Scroll down to the bottom of the right tool set when you have the contact sheet set up the way you want it and click “Save.” In the dialog box that appears, name your contact sheet and save it to the location you want.

Adobe Bridge is a file opening wizard created for use with Adobe creative products like Premiere, Illustrator and Photoshop. Unlike the simple text-named files displayed when you use the “Open” feature in Adobe programs, Adobe Bridge provides thumbnails of image and video files and a preview pane where you can view those files before opening them. The Bridge opening system can help you find files more easily by giving you a visual reference for the file. Also, you can edit photos using Bridge without using Photoshop.

1. Open the “File” menu and choose “Bridge” or “Browse in Bridge” from the menu options in Photoshop or another Adobe program. Adobe Bridge opens in the Adobe application window. Or, you can open the Bridge application by itself.
2. Step 2

   Switch between views in Adobe Bridge by clicking the “Essentials,” “Film Strip” or “Metadata” on the view bar. Each viewing option offers a different way of displaying the files in Adobe Bridge, but “Essentials” works well for most purposes.

3. Step 3

   Navigate through the drives that are connected to your computer, including the computer’s main hard drive and external drives, by clicking on any of the drives listed in the “Folders” pane of Adobe Bridge. Once you select a drive, you can go to any folder on that drive. Any media files contained in the folder you have highlighted that are compatible with Adobe programs will display in the “Content” pane.

4. Step 4

   Click on any file in the “Content” pane and the media file displays in the “Preview” pane. This makes it easy to see the differences between small and similar photos before opening them up in the main application window.

5. Step 5

   Double-click the name of the file when you find a file that you want to open. Just like with the standard “Open” feature in Adobe creative programs, the file opens in the main window of the Adobe application.

6. Step 6

   Edit photo files on the fly using Adobe Bridge. Right-click a photo and select “Open in Camera Raw” from the drop-down menu. An edit pane will appear. Basic Photoshop functions like sharpening and color adjusting are available.

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

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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.

www.abbyyfinereader.ru

Adobe Bridge acts as a “bridge” between all the Adobe Creative Suite CS4 applications. You can browse directories of images and other supported assets in Bridge, then drag images into Dreamweaver without leaving Bridge. Here are the steps.

Open Dreamweaver

1. Step 1

   Open a document in Dreamweaver that you want to create or edit.

2. Step 2

   Place your cursor in the document where you want the imported asset from Bridge to appear.

3. Step 3

   Choose File > Browse in Bridge. The first time you do this you can choose whether or not to have Bridge automatically open each time you log in.

4. Step 4

   Within Bridge, navigate to the folder on your computer where images you want to use are stored. Or you can choose File > Get Photos from Camera to move images directly from your camera.

5. Step 5
   Bridge in compact mode

   You can browse through your images in several ways. One is shown in this image, with it’s view of the images in the selected folder shown in compact mode. You can also view in full-screen mode or ultra-compact mode by clicking an icon in the upper right corner of the window. If you choose to use compact mode (the size shown here) the Bridge window will always be on top of other open applications.

6. Step 6

   
   

   Bridge View menu

   Using the View menu you can choose to view your assets as a Slideshow too.

7. Step 7

   Use the slider across the bottom of the Bridge window (see image in Step 5) to reduce or enlarge the thumbnail images you have showing.

8. Step 8

   When you find the perfect image, drag it from the Bridge window and drop it into Dreamweaver in the position you selected. Add some alternative text to describe the image for accessibility purposes–and you’re done.

9. Step 9

   If you want to leave Bridge open for further use, but get it out of the way, you can minimize the window or switch to full-screen mode so that the Bridge window will not always be on top. If you are finished with Bridge, close the application.