Customizing the Bridge workspace

The Adobe Bridge is a powerful application which you'll use to browse and preview and work with your photographs. And you'll use this application in tandem with Photoshop. And here in this initial movie, I want to take a look at how we can customize Bridge, how we can become familiar with it, and also how we can dial in a few important settings when working with the Bridge. One of the first things that you'll notice is that Bridge is divided up into these different panel groups. You can see I have a panel titled Content and then different panels over here.

Each of these panels are separated by a dividing line. If you hover over it, your cursor will change. When you see that new cursor, you can simply click and drag in order to reconfigure the way that this will be displayed, and we can do this with all of these different panels. Let's say we want more space allocated to the Preview panel. We'll just simply click and drag in order to open up more space for that so that you have a larger image preview. What about if you want to collapse a panel? You can do that by double-clicking on its tab. Double-clicking on a panel tab will either close or open that tab.

Let's do that here. When I double- click on Metadata, those panels have now collapsed to the bottom. Double-click again, now they're reopened. All right! What about viewing our images? We can either click through our images by simply clicking on them here, or what you can do is use your arrow keys. By using your arrow keys--Left and Right Arrow key--you can scroll forward or backward through your photographs. Another thing that you may have noticed is that the background is dark gray. You can customize that by navigating to your Preferences. To do that, navigate to your Preferences by going to the Adobe Bridge pulldown menu and then select Preferences.

In this dialog, you want to go to the General tab. In the General tab, you can control the Appearance. Here you can change the color either by clicking on these chips or by using these sliders. When you do this, you'll notice that the entire interface or theme here changes. You also notice that as I make these choices, it's moving these sliders. Let's say we want to make some manual adjustments. Here you can just go ahead and click and drag in order to make those changes. All right! What about accent color? Well, in order to show you that, I'm going to move this dialog over to the left.

You'll notice I have a slight gray highlight around the image which I've selected. If I change my accent color to something different. Let's try this one here. You notice that it then changes the way that this is highlighted. Here, we have a number of different options which we can go through. So again, you want to choose one of those which will suit your own needs and which you think looks good. All right! After having done that, I am going to reset this back to this color theme here, which is the default color theme. The next thing I want to highlight is how we open Bridge. We can either open it by clicking on the application icon or there's a really handy preference.

Most of these preferences are all fine, just the default settings. But the one you might want to change is under the Advanced tab. If you click on that, you have an option to Start Bridge At Login. In other words, when you fire up and turn on your computer, this will automatically launch Bridge so that you can then begin to use it. I find that this is a helpful preference because I almost always use Bridge when I'm working with Photoshop, because it's a really great way to browse and preview and work with your photographs. All right! Let's go ahead and click OK in order to apply these new preferences.

Another thing that you can do when working with the way that Bridge appears is you can change the overall workspace. Currently, I'm in the default Essentials workspace, yet I've customized it a little bit by simply dragging one of these dividing lines over. You can also move to other workspaces by clicking on this button here or by going to another menu, which I'll show you in a minute. Here, let's say you prefer a workspace where you have a Filmstrip down below at the base of Bridge. Here, in this case, I now have this Filmstrip, and I can click through my photographs.

If I want my thumbnails to be larger or smaller, again, all that we need to do is to hover over this dividing line. We can drag it up or drag it down in order to change the size of those thumbnails there. Now once you've made a change to a workspace, you can always go back by clicking on this button and choosing the other workspace, or you can go to the Window pulldown menu. Here we'll find these same options, Window > Workspace, and then here you can see we have these various workspaces. When I select Essentials, what you'll notice is it will go back to the Essentials workspace, exactly as I previously reconfigured it.

In other words, each workspace has some built-in memory. It will always remember how you've configured it, and this is really nice because when it comes to reconfiguring the way these workspaces look, you only need to do this once. All right! Well, that wraps up our first look at the Adobe Bridge. We obviously need to dig a little bit deeper into how we can work with this tool, and so we'll do that in the next few movies.