GET THE MOST OUT OF ADOBE BRIDGE

Adobe Bridge is a creative asset manager that lets you preview, organise, edit, and publish multiple creative assets quickly and easily. It’s also a way to show images to your clients if they want to choose their images straight after the shoot.

Culling

When you have just finished a shoot the first thing that you want to do is go through your images and select the most successful shots. Using an application like Bridge allows you to do that freely, especially on an OS system which makes deleting or rearranging images in the finder difficult.

Labels

If you are someone who likes to manage your workflow beyond just ratings, then labels would be the next step for you. You can label images for different stages of the editing process. Select is red (CTRL+6/Apple key+6), Second is yellow (7), Approved is green (8), Review is Blue (9), and To Do is Lilac.

Update the metadata

On your camera(s) you can add your copyright information, but there are times when you might forget to set it up, such as borrowing a camera or buying a new one. You can highlight all the images in Bridge and edit the metadata that way. Don’t forget to include all your business details, including your website and address.

Rating tool

This is a tool that I truly believe helps speed up your workflow. When you have lots of images to sort through, it helps to star or ‘rate’ the images in importance value by pressing numbers 1-5. Another great thing about this is that if you star an image on your camera it will show up in Bridge.

Tabs and creating contacts

When working in Bridge it’s always helpful to be able to work in tabs – you could be culling in one tab and viewing the rated images in another. If you need to send images to clients before retouching, you can create contact sheets to save you sending hundreds of images over.

Open images in ACR

Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) is great for flexibility. I tend to use it to apply a basic edit to a batch of images that need to be created into a contact sheet. It’s also useful for applying quick corrections to exposure and colour, for example, before opening into Photoshop for more detailed editing if you want to bypass Lightroom.