Customizing the Bridge workspace

In order to get good at Photoshop it's helpful to understand how you can use Adobe Bridge. So you may be thinking well why is that and what is Bridge? Well you can think of Bridge as the starting point in your overall work flow. And as you'll discover, you can use Bridge in order to view, open, and access your photographs. And you can do a lot in bridge. And soon, it will become an integral part to your overall workflow. Therefore, here, let's take a look at how we can start to use Bridge. We'll also look at how we can customize the work space. Then in the subsequent movies, we'll dig a bit deeper. Well, for starters, you'll notice that we have different panels. There's one panel which is called our Folders panel. Here I've selected a folder from our exercise file. Next we have the Content panel.

This is where we see small thumbnails of our photographs. We can click on these different thumbnails in order to view a larger preview in the Preview panel. You can also navigate through your photographs by using the arrow keys. When you press the right arrow keys, you'll move forward. When you press the left arrow key, you can then move backwards. Another thing that you can do is you can change the size of the thumbnails. You can do so, by clicking on the thumbnail slider which you'll find at the bottom of the Bridge interface. Click an drag to the left to make those smaller.

Drag that to the right in order to increase their size. In this way, you can customize this so that you can view your, images a little bit easier. Well here you can see I can't see all of the thumbnails. In order to scroll through them, you can use this scroll bar here, so that you can access and view those photographs. All right. Well you can also customize the interface, and let me show you why that might be helpful. Here I'll press the right arrow key to move forward through my photographs, and when I get to this picture here, I notice that the preview. Well, it's just a bit too small. You can increase the size of any panel by hovering over the dividing line. In this case, the dividing line between the Content and the Preview panels. So here when we hover over that dividing line, you'll notice the cursor changes. Next what you need to do is to click and drag.

When you see a cursor icon change, that indicates that you can click and drag. And that will then allow you to change the size of the panel. In this case, it allows us to have a larger preview of our photograph here. Another way you can customize the panels, is by changing their size vertically. Here have the Preview panel, underneath it, the metadata panel. Notice there is again, a dividing line. Hover over that, you'll see the cursor change. When you see that, that indicates that you can click and drag so here we'll click and drag up in order to open up more space for our Metadata panel.

So that we can view valuable information about our photograph. Next I'll hover over this line again and click and drag down in order to make that smaller. Well let's say that you want to close a panel, you want to get rid of it. Almost like closing a drawer. Well, you can do that as well. What you need to do is to simply double click on the panel name. So if I double click on the word meta data here. What we'll see is that that panel will disappear. Again, it's kind of like closing a drawer. To re-open it, simply double click on the word again, and you can re-open it in that way. Another way that you can customize the interface or workspace Is by choosing a different work space.

There are a few different ways that you can do this. Let me show you the first technique that you can use, and that is to navigate to the Window pull down menu. Think of it as the window that you're looking at. Here we can choose Work space, and then we have a number of different options. One option that you might like, as a photographer, is Film strip. This allows us to view our content panel below, here we see small thumbnails. And then we can click through these thumbnails in order to view a larger preview above. We can also use the arrow keys. Press the left arrow key to move backwards press the right arrow key to move forwards.

In this way we have a nice big preview of our pictures. Now if the thumbnails are too small in the Filmstrip work space layout, what you can do is hover over that dividing line. Remember we've already learned this trick. And just click and drag. And here you can see it can increase the size of those thumbnails. Click and drag down, in order to decrease their size. You can also use the thumbnail slider as well, as we've done before. Well let's say that you've changed the workspace like we've done here. And you want to go back to the default Essentials workspace. To that, navigate back to the Window pull down menu, here select Workspace and then simply choose Essentials.

When we click on Essentials, what we'll discover is that bridge will remember how we last configured the workspace. And that's really handy because it helps us to have some consistency with our overall workflow. Another way that you can change the workspace is by clicking on these buttons here. If you don't see all of those buttons, hover over this little line at the end and here you can see you can click and drag more or less of those options. You can also access the workspaces by clicking on this icon and again, here we have different options. So there's a lot of different techniques that we can use in order to choose work spaces.

Most importantly, what you want to do is customize the workspace so that it fits for your overall workflow. So here I'll just drag that back to where it was, and then I'll use the scroll bar in order to scroll up to view more of the photographs. All right, well now that we've started to become familiar with Bridge, let's dig a little bit deeper into how we can use bridge and let's do that in the next movie.