The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers

Chapter 3. Rating and Keywording Images

PHOTO EDITING IN BRIDGE

Over the years, Adobe has quietly been adding tools to Photoshop to help photographers organize their work. In Chapter 2, you saw how Photo Downloader efficiently moves pictures from your memory card to your computer. In this chapter, I'll show you how Bridge, a sophisticated image browser, has evolved into an important photo management tool.

What is photo management? Basically, it involves everything you do to a photo except image adjustment and output. And that's a big part of photography these days. You have hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures on your hard drive. Can you quickly retrieve the one shot you're looking for? Do you know which in a series of eight images is the sharpest? You will after embracing the techniques I'm about to explain.

The flow is quite simple. You move your images from your camera to your computer using Photo Downloader, and then let that application hand off the newly added images to Bridge for organization. I must confess that I love this stage of the flow. Here's where I first get to enjoy looking at my images, and at the same time I'm organizing them so that I know my best shots from the average ones. And if that wasn't good enough, I can quickly add keywords to make it even easier to find a particular shot at a later date. All of this happens in one seamless flow of events that takes ...