Hints and Tips for ADOBE BRIDGE

This page provides hints and tips for the use of Adobe Bridge software.

They are not in any particular order. New tips will be added to the end of the list in each sub-section.

The success of this service will depend upon the willingness of club members to contribute their ideas.

If you have a hint or tip that you would like to share please email it to the webmaster.

From Adobe Bridge CS3 you should be able to open JPEG or TIFF files in Adobe Camera Raw by right-clicking on the thumbnail and selecting “Open in Camera Raw” from the drop down list. If “Open in Camera Raw” does not appear on the drop down list, try purging the cache. From the menu select TOOLS>CACHE>PURGE CACHE.

There is an easier way to find a particular image than working your way backwards and forwards through the subfolders. Just go to the parent folder (the one that contains all the other subfolders) and click on the Flatten View icon at the top left of the Filter panel (see adjacent image). This will reveal thumbnails of all the images in the parent folder and in all the subfolders and sub-subfolders. It might take a few moments for them to appear if there are lots of files.

The subfolders have not been deleted, they have just temporarily been made transparent. No files have been moved on yur hard disk.

To get back to the "normal" way of viewing your images just click on the Flatten View icon again.

If you have several images that were taken under the same lighting conditions with the same exposure settings you do not have to adjust each of them separately in Camera Raw. Process one of them in Camera Raw and then copy the "Development Settings" to the others from inside Bridge.

Just right click on the thumbnail of the image that has been adjusted and select "Development Setting>Copy Settings" from the fly-out menu. Then select the thumbnails for the other images you want to adjust, right click on the thumbnail of one of the images and select "Development Settings>Paste Settings" from the fly-out menu.

You can use the "Copy Development Settings" technique described in the previous tip to remove spots (e.g., from dust on the sensor) from a batch of images. Just open one image, remove all the dust spots with the Healing Tool in Camera Raw, then use the technique above to copy these Healing settings to all the other images.

It is sometimes useful to be able to produce a "small" version of an image directly from Bridge without opening it in Photoshop and going through the Image>Image size procedure. For example, you might have several images that you want to email.

The procedure is described in this tutorial. You can use this procedure directly with RAW images or you can use it with TIFF, JPEG or Photoshop files.

If you have several images that are basically the same (or several images that are related to the same topic) and you don't want to display them all at once in Bridge you can create "stacks" of images. Just select the images and then press Control-G. The images will be grouped into a stack with one image on top and a small number in the top left of that image to indicae how many images are in the stack.

To view all the images in a stack just select the thumbnail for the stack and press Control-G again.

All images on this site and all documents and tutorials linked to this site are copyright.

This page last updated 12th July 2008 (RK)