Adobe Bridge CS4

Within the past couple of weeks, I upgraded my copy of Photoshop. I previously had version CS, and now I have version CS4, which is the latest release as of now. Photoshop is an amazing product, and I look forward to learning much more about it. In the past, I had only used Photoshop to do some minor contrast adjustments, set different colorspaces, resizing, and sharpening. I also tended to use Corel's Paint Shop Pro X2 for similar tasks. Now I want to concentrate my learning towards Photoshop and start using it for much more, including things like compositing, retouching, and advanced color correction.

For the reminder of this post, however, I want to talk about a product that comes with Adobe Photoshop CS4, and that is Bridge CS4. In my old version of Photoshop I was accustomed to its image browser, but I really just used it to find a picture and open it and nothing more. The image browser was self contained in Photoshop. Bridge CS4 is a stand-alone application and the first time I ran it I was blown away. Perhaps some of the features that I am going to discuss were already available in the old image browser, but I never became aware of them. They are so much more accessible in this new browser, anyway.

Bridge CS4 is divided into several panes. The main one is the image thumbnails themselves. They show the pictures already rotated if orientation data was recorded in the file. Just as you would expect, you can click one picture or use Shift or Ctrl to select several images. If you select one image, that image will show up as a larger preview in another pane. Below the preview pane is a pane for viewing and updating image metadata. Metadata is data that either the camera embedded in the file when it took the picture or it is data that is recorded later in an application such as Bridge. Camera data consists of such things as camera model, lens used, focal length used, f number (aperture), ISO speed, shutter speed, white balance settings, metering modes, whether flash was used or not, portrait/landscape orientation, colorspace, and so on. Data that is recorded later can include photographer contact information, copyright notices, keywords, geotagging information (although some cameras can record this when the picture is taken), and ratings. The final pane is for filtering and for collections. I'm not sure what collections is all about right now, but I will check it out later. Filtering is really neat. After Bridge has had a chance to scan the folder, it builds a list of various criteria that can be filtered. Some examples are date created, lens used, focal length, ISO speed settings, and portrait/landscape orientation. Based on one particular folder on my hard drive that has about 3,100 pictures in it, I can quickly see that I mainly shoot at ISO 100, that by far my favorite lens is my Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens, and that my favorite focal length is 24mm and my next favorite is 105mm. Those, of course, are the two extremes of that lens. I can tell you this because Bridge CS4 tallies the number of times each focal length (or other criteria) is used. For me this has some real practicality. I've been debating about getting a new, fast prime lens. I have been looking at the Canon EF 24mm f/1.4L II USM and the Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM. Although I will likely get both eventually, I can tell from my past picture taking that I will get far more use (according to Bridge) out of the 24mm lens, so that is probably the one I will get first, if I can find it in stock (that's another story).

The ability to add metadata is a nice feature, too. I can add keywords to images, and add my contact information to photos as well. The contact information can be stored in a template and applied to a whole bunch of pictures at a time. Keywords can be applied to one picture at a time or multiple pictures. It just depends on how many pictures you select in the thumbnail pane. There were several things that I was curious about when it came to metadata. The first was whether the process of adding metadata to the JPEG was destructive in any way to the image. Based on my research it is not. The JPEG has a header part and an image part, and the process of adding metadata only involves the header and not the image. Of course, my concern stems from the fact that using an image editing program to repeatedly open a JPEG and re-save as a JPEG, will lead to degradation. The next thing that I was curious about was whether other applications messed with the metadata previously written. Bridge does not really handle geotagging, so I wondered if I can add most of the metadata in Bridge and then add the geotagging information via the Picasa and Google Earth combination. This process works fine and leaves all metadata intact. Finally, I was wondering how websites such as Flickr and Picasa would read the metadata. The Picasa website doesn't really use a lot of the metadata, but it does use the geotagging data, and the keywords, and the shooting data (aperture, shutter speed, etc.). Flickr can use pretty much all of the data that can be recorded. It has ways to map the location of the picture. It will show the shooting data with just one click of the mouse, and will show the majority of the metadata with another click of the mouse. The keyword metadata is automatically shown as Flickr's tags.

I am very impressed with Bridge and expect to be using it quite a bit. I did forget to mention one pane of the Bridge screen, and that is the folder view, where it shows your entire directory tree. I will post more about this application once I learn more about it.

Ned