Adobe Photoshop CS5 One-on-One

Organizing and Examining Photos

A cynic might argue that the first incarnation of the Creative Suite

was largely a marketing scheme designed to get Photoshop users

to take up excellent but less popular products such as Illustrator

and InDesign. But over time, the collection has matured, and the

standalone Bridge deserves a lot of the credit. The Bridge is no mere

image opener—in many regards, it’s a full-blown digital asset man-

ager. In the Bridge, you can review images and illustrations, rotate

them, delete them, move them to different folders, organize them

into collections, and flag them for later use. You can even preview

images at full size, filter which images you see and which you don’t,

and group related images into stacks. If you have just a few dozen

images lying around your hard drive, this may seem like overkill.

But if you have a few hundred, a thousand, or a hundred thousand,

the Bridge is an absolute necessity.

PeaRl Of WISDOm

In many ways, the Bridge is a better and more flexible navigation tool than

the Windows or Macintosh operating system. Where else can you whip

through a folder of images or illustrations and view instantly scalable, high-

quality thumbnails? Or rename a group of files in a single operation? It’s a

media manager’s dream.

To get a sense of what the Bridge can do, including resizing and pri-

oritizing thumbnails, try the following steps. (These steps assume

that the Bridge is set to the Essentials workspace, as it is by default.)

1. Open the Bridge. Click the icon in the application
   bar. Or press the shortcut, Ctrl+Alt+O (or �-Option-O).


2. Navigate to the McClelland Boys folder. Click the
   Folders tab in the top-left corner of the Bridge and use the folder
   tree to navigate to the McClelland Boys folder. Again, it’s inside
   the Lesson 01 folder inside Lesson Files-PsCS5 1on1.


3. Enlarge the thumbnails. By default, the thumbnails in the
   content browser are tiny. That’s great for assessing the broad
   contents of a folder but less than optimal when gauging the
   images’ appearance. To increase the size of the thumbnails, drag
   the slider triangle in the bottom-right corner of the window,
   which I’ve circled in orange in Figure 1-6.

Alternatively, you can zoom thumb nails from the keyboard. After

selecting a thumbnail, press Ctrl+ (or �- ) to make the thumbnails

larger; press Ctrl+ (�- ) to make them smaller. The maximum

thumbnail size is 1024 pixels in either direction.

Figure 1-6.

10 Lesson 1: Open and Organize