Subtitles of the Movie

Some people try to skip setting preferences, figuring that it's not really necessary. They think that Adobe must have set the default values reasonably and they don't want to take the time or to be bothered. They want to get right down to working with their images and while that's understandable, the thing is that Bridge serves the needs of a lot of different people, from graphic artists to commercial photographers to hobbyists. Some of those people are using a slew of Adobe products in one of the suites or perhaps Light Room and others simply have Photoshop. So although the default values are an OK starting place, your work life will ultimately be easier and more efficient if you take the time to deal with preferences. To access Preferences on a PC, select Edit, Preferences and on a Mac, come over here to Bridge and choose Preferences. You can see that there are a lot of options that are accessible from different categories over here. I'm going to highlight the main ones that may concern you. To begin, with the General Preferences and the Appearance, I leave the sliders close to their default value. While it can be tempting to change them to pure black for stronger contrast, because then you images will stand out and pop, the interface contrast will actually skew your perception and make it harder to accurately assess your images. Once you change these sliders, there's no way to get back to the exact default values. You'll have to settle for being approximately close. You can also determine the accent color to use for what Bridge uses to highlight folders, et cetera. This is purely a visual preference. I like Crystal. If you opt to check When a Camera is Connected, Launch Adobe Photo Downloader, then Photo Downloader will launch automatically every time your camera or your compact flash card is connected. If that's what you want to happen, then go ahead and check this. Checking this option means that opening an image in Camera Raw doesn't require Photoshop itself to open. Also, you can work in Photoshop separately without Camera Raw using its memory. It's really only an issue if you're doing a very graphics-intensive task and processing a lot of images in Camera Raw. But it really doesn't hurt to have it checked either. So I advise checking it. Checking the next option makes it so that you must press a modifier key in order to access the Loop or Magnifier Tool. While normally I don't like having to click modifier keys, in this case I do; otherwise I find that I'm accidentally bringing up the Loop Tool, which gets very annoying to me. Click whichever items down here you want to be in your Favorites Tab by default. And if ever you need to reset all your warning dialogs, this is where that reset is located. So if you've gotten rid of some of them and then wish that you hadn't, come back here and reset them. Under Thumbnail Preferences, I leave the first option set to 1,000 megabytes. That way Bridge doesn't get caught up in trying to create previews for very huge files. However, if you regularly create giant panoramas or composites and want to be able to see previews of them, then you may need to increase this number. Whatever limit you put here doesn't mean you can't work with larger files. It just means that Bridge won't create a preview of them. There are lots of options for what items you can display as detail under your thumbnails. Each one of these four spaces gives you full access to the entire list. You can choose as many or as few as you like and whichever options make sense to you. I love to see the image dimensions, bit depth and document type to make sure that if I have a JPEG and a TIF and a Raw file of each image, that I know which one I'm working with. And I also like to be able to see tool tips so I check that. Playback I leave at its default settings as I do with Metadata. However, if a certain piece of information is not appearing in the Metadata Panel and you'd like to see it, go back to this preference and make sure that that item is checked. You can see that there are a lot of information here that you can go through. Conversely, if there's more information than you care about, make certain to only check those items that you want to see. You can always change your mind and add more. You're only controlling what information is visible to you in the display. The Bridge isn't throwing the rest of the information away.