Subtitles of the Movie

On the top of the Bridge Interface, there are a series of icons. Hovering your cursor over them will cause a tool tip to appear that explains exactly what each icon does. The arrows are a quick way of going back and forth among folders that you were just using. Go back and go forward. The Down Arrow is a quick way of navigating to a folder without clicking on the Folder Tab because in a different view, you might not have this tab available at all and you'd still want to be able to access your folders. The next icon allows you to quickly select a recent file that may have been opened in one of a variety of Adobe products. Note the group of icons that deal with navigation over here are separated from the next group of icons by this little bar. The next icon accesses the Photo Downloader or getPhotos from Camera, which I covered in another movie. This icon accesses the Review Mode, as well as Batch Rename and file information when you have a file selected. The new Review Mode is very helpful when editing through your images. We'll look at it in more detail in the movie on Editing Images. Clicking this icon will immediately open your image in Camera Raw. This last icon in this series accesses a different workspace that's used for outputting to the web or a PDF. We'll look at that in more detail in another movie. On the top right, we've already covered this drawer that accesses the workspaces or the drop-down. Next to that is the Search Window so that you can search for any particular file or folder. On the far right is an icon you can use to make Bridge make a smaller version of itself so that you can keep an eye on Bridge and perhaps be working on something else in the background at the same time. This next line of icons is called the Path Bar and it may or may not be visible depending on whether you have it checked in Window. If it's not visible, toggle it on. I advise keeping it visible because without it, the trashcan icon over here on the far right is not accessible. Of course, you can right click and choose Move to Trash to delete a file. Deleting that way takes longer. At the beginning of the Path Bar is a directory showing you the path and thus the name Path Bar, to the folder that you're working on. These next two icons deal with the quality of the thumbnails you see. If you click the first one, Bridge will use the JPEG that's embedded in a Raw file to quickly generate previews and thumbnails. You'll see your images faster this way but they won't be as accurate. This next icon has options for Always High Quality, High Quality on Demand or Prefer Embedded. I generally prefer to keep it on Always High Quality because if I'm going to make decisions about keeping or rejecting an image, I'd like to do that with the most accurate information possible. This last option instructs Bridge to build the previews to the full size of the image. I don't usually do this because it slows the process down and requires more memory. It's important to remember that the high-quality previews that Bridge generates may look different from the embedded JPEG versions because the high-quality previews use the settings that you've selected in Camera Raw to decode the Raw file. These may differ in color and contrast from the JPEG file and may not have sharpening applied by default either. The Star Icon is a quick way to filter the images based on labels and ratings. We'll look at that in more detail in another movie. You use the next icon, the Sort Manually Command, to display your images in a different sort order based on whatever criteria you select and you can also opt for ascending or descending order from this icon. Use the arrows to rotate an image counter-clockwise or clockwise. The Folder Icon is a quick access to files recently opened in Photoshop and this next Folder Icon lets you create a new folder and at the very end is the trashcan. At the bottom of the interface there is a slider that controls the size of the thumbnails. You can see you can make them very large, very small, et cetera. If you click this icon, it will lock the grid so that even though you might slide the thumbnail slider, it locks the amount of space between them so that they stay the same size. If you click this icon, then the content window has more flexibility. So that's completely a matter of personal preference. These last two icons are quick ways to change the content. This one removes the information so that you just see the pictures, this one adds more detail in a list form. Clearly there's a lot of information packed into one interface in Bridge, but once you get familiar with all these icons, you'll work faster. In another movie we'll look at customizing what's visible and exactly where in order to make Bridge the most convenient interface possible.