Adobe Bridge and Adobe Lightroom are, at their roots, sorting programs. They allow you to review lots of photos at once and organize them. But they also do so much more. You can use either program to edit your photos, and if you hit Control-R (Command-R in Macs) while you're in Bridge, it will take you to a special page where you can quickly edit Camera Raw photos and save them any way you want, in any folder you want.
In fact, these programs seem so similar that I asked our workshop teacher, Markus Pfitzner, why we had to learn both. Here's essentially what he explained: Adobe Bridge allows you to quickly access any photo file without having to go through the extra step of importing it. Just select the folder you want to see, and Bridge opens all the photos in it for you. Plus, you can do most of your photo editing right in Bridge, although it can't do selections, masks, and layers like Photoshop does.
Bridge is linked with Adobe Photoshop, which means that it's automatically installed when you install Photoshop onto your computer. That also means that a double click on a photo displayed in Bridge will open that image in Photoshop, and conversely, when you're already in Photoshop, hitting Control+Alt+O (Browse) will open Bridge.
You can set up Bridge to label each photo and add copyright information to it (which is crucial if you're sending it out into the world), plus, you can add keywords. Keywords are little descriptive tags that you type in about that photo. For example, I have some of the flower shots that I took at the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens on my Heart of Stone Studio website (to drop by and take a look at them, click here: Judy's Photos). The Dahlia photos I took could have been assigned keywords such as: dahlia, flower, garden, California, Mendocino, Botanical Gardens, etc. Typing in keywords might seem like extra work to do just when you'd prefer to spend time admiring all your photos, but it's not so bad because Bridge and Lightroom will assign the same keywords instantly to a bunch of pictures if you select them ahead of time.
And the absolutely coolest thing about keywords is that you can use them to search for and pull photos for you. Say you shot flowers like I did in Mendocino, but over the years you also shot them in Hawaii, Kew Gardens, Vermont and in your own backyard--but those photos are scattered around different folders on your computer. If you go to Bridge and do a keyword search and type in "flower", Bridge will rummage through all your files and pull up every photo of a flower that you've ever taken, assuming that you had entered in "flower" as a keyword for each of them. Isn't that neat?
In addtion to organizing, labeling, and basic editing, Bridge also enables you to crop and size your photo before saving it, and gives you options which enable you to save a copy for your files and a smaller copy for e-mailing or posting to the Web. And it does all of this while hovering over your photo files like an alien spaceship, grabbing a hapless file here and there (at your command), making changes, and plopping it back wherever you direct. It's quick and easy.
So, you say, if Bridge is this great and it comes free with Photoshop, then why should I consider investing in another program like Lightroom? "Ah," I answer, "there are lots of reasons, the main one being that Lightroom does everything Bridge does, but also does so much more..."
And I'll discuss Lightroom in my next post.
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