Bridge CS4

Ben Long

Return to the main Photoshop CS4 review.
The new Bridge offers a few important interface features. There are now four buttons across the top of the Bridge window that let you change between four window layouts: Essentials, Filmstrip, Metadata, and Output. These make it simple to change from a thumbnail-oriented workspace to a larger preview, or to a workspace optimized for metadata editing. The Output workspace opens the new Output panel, which displays controls for creating contact sheets, Web galleries, and more.
You can create custom-defined workspaces and save them, and Adobe also includes a few additional predefined workspaces. In CS3, the workspace switching buttons were at the bottom of the screen; if you’re accustomed to clicking on them there, it may take a few days to adapt. Of course, you can also switch workspaces using keyboard controls. When you save a new workspace, it automatically takes the place of the first entry on the Workspace bar. You can drag the workspaces to re-arrange them, but you can’t assign specific keyboard equivalents.
The Bridge CS4 interface. Click the image to see a larger version.

For folder navigation, Bridge still has the Favorites and Folders panes of its predecessor, but it now includes a Path Bar at the top of the screen, which displays a breadcrumbs view of the path to the directory you’re viewing. You can click on any entry in the path to switch to that directory. This is a great addition that makes navigation speedier.
The new Path Bar makes it easy to navigate back up a directory path.

As with previous versions, the Adobe Photo Downloader is integrated with Bridge to give you an easy way to copy images from media cards.
Collections
One of the most significant additions is the inclusion of Collections, which allow you to create virtual albums within Bridge. You can drag images into a Collection from any folder on your drive and maintain a level of organization above your folder structure. Smart Collections lets you build collections that are automatically populated based on image metadata.
Collections take Bridge a step beyond a simple file browser, but they still need a little bit of work. There’s no way to export a Collection, so if you switch computers, you have to do a lot of work to copy over the relevant Bridge Preferences and support files to ensure. Similarly, if you’d like to give someone a copy of a Collection, you can easily copy the images, but the recipient must define a new Collection in his or her copy of Bridge. Once an image link is broken, Bridge provides a simple dialog box that lets you locate the image, but if you’ve broken lots of links there’s no way to fix an entire folder-full at once.
Review and Preview
The other major change to Bridge is its more powerful previewing features. Now you can select any image, press the space bar, and immediately go to a full screen preview of it that hides the Bridge interface. You can zoom in and out with the + and – keys, but you can’t put multiple images side-by-side in full screen mode, making direct comparisons impossible.
The Review mode is an entirely new interface for making selects from a group of images. To use it, you select the images you want to work with and then choose Review Mode from the View menu, or press Control/Command-B. Again, the Bridge interface hides, the screen will go blank, and you’re presented with a carousel view of your images. You can use the left and right arrows to rotate the carousel to view each image.
Review Mode provides an entirely new interface for selecting the best images from a group. Click the image to see a larger version.

You can assign ratings when in Review Mode and use Bridge’s Loupe tool to examine fine details. Most importantly, if you find an image you don’t like, you can press the down arrow key to removed the image from the selection (but not delete it).
When you’re done, you can automatically create a Collection from the remaining images, or return to Bridge’s normal interface, where you’ll find that only the remaining images are selected.
Review Mode lets you easily refine a selection of images to only those that you like. However, while its carousel animation is cute, it doesn’t serve any purpose. What I’d really like to do is view multiple images at the same time, side-by-side, and zoom in to the same places on both. Very often, what makes one image superior to another are subtle sharpness and detail issues that are only visible under high magnification, and you ideally want to compare these zooms side by side. Review Mode doesn’t allow that.
Fortunately, in the Preview window, you can view images side-by-side, and open a loupe on each image, and drag all of the loupes simultaneously to view the same locations in each image. However, Bridge’s Loupe is not always well-behaved. Multiple loupes can overlap, making the lower ones useless, and if a loupe isn’t oriented in the correct direction, it can fall off the edge of the screen. This was a problem in the last version of Bridge, as well.
The lack of a histogram in Bridge can be frustrating. Often, when comparing images, I want to see a histogram, or at least a highlight clipping display, so I can tell if an image is overexposed. When trying to choose one image from a set, subtle exposure differences are often the deciding factor, and a histogram display in Bridge would make that easier.
Panos and HDR
The new Auto-Stack Panorama/HDR feature attempts to analyze the current folder for groups of images that need to be stitched into panoramas, or merged into HDRs. Images that it decides fit these criteria are automatically stacked. For the most part, Bridge does a good job of accurately identifying HDR and panorama sets, though the analysis can take a long time. And the feature doesn’t necessarily scale well. When I tried it on a folder of 500 images, Photoshop thought for a long time and then crashed. When I tried a second time, it thought for a long time but didn’t stack anything.
Once it’s stacked its images, you can select the stacks and choose the new Process Collections in Photoshop command, which passes the stacks to Photoshop and attempts to automatically trigger either Photomerge or Merge to HDR. In my tests, it did well with panoramas but never properly identified an HDR. It consistently tried to Photomerge HDR sets, which, needless to say, didn’t produce great results.
Fortunately, you still have the same manual controls that were in CS3, so you can still use Bridge to launch your panorama and HDR chores.
Speed and Stability
Bridge’s performance in general is noticeably improved over the CS3 version, and the program seems significantly more stable. Bridge CS3 routinely crashed on my Mac, but I haven’t had any crashes with CS4, not even with the beta versions.
Overall, Adobe has done a very good job with Bridge, adding some valuable new features and interface improvements. Collections and the new previewing features are welcome, but you’ll probably find yourself looking forward to the second-generation versions of many of the new features.
Return to the main Photoshop CS4 review.