New Year's Greetings to All!
Have you made your resolutions yet? If you just can't decide what resolution or goal to set, maybe we can help with some suggestions.
Do you have a way to organize your files, so at any time, you can put your hands on that one specific picture or document? No? Then, why not resolve to learn (and then use) Adobe Bridge? This is a powerful media management tool that can help you browse through, locate, view, and sort many types of files. It is easy to learn to use, and an excellent way to manage your files, which can get out of hand really quickly. Plus, if you have ever bought a version of Creative Suite or any of several standalone Adobe programs, you probably already own it. So there's no extra cost to you at all!
It's has a completely customizable interface so the features you want are the ones most easily viewed, and it works with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat and other program files.
I like the thumbnail preview features myself. The thumbnails are scalable, so if you need to see the details of an image, a sliding view bar allows you to grow the thumbnail until it fills the viewing area. Plus, when a photo or document is selected, various menus can give you all the information, including metadata, that you could possibly want to know about that file. Once selected, a particular file can also be labelled or rated. Then Bridge can sort the files to show only the photos or documents you have labelled or rated a certain way. Very handy when selecting a few photos from a photoshoot of hundreds.
Bridge CS5 can also quickly create PDF presentations. You can configure the final size of the presentation, the resolution quality, headers or footers, whether the file names show or not, page numbers, presentation playback options, and the addition of watermarks to your photos all with this one tool. To do this, select the images to be included in your PDF, or if you want all images in a folder, you don't have to select any. Then click on the Output Menu icon, and then Output to Web or PDF. Click on the PDF option, and configure your settings from there. Click "save" to create your PDF presentation. Easy!
It has many other features I have found useful, including opening RAW photos for editing (without launching Photoshop!), creating vector images with Illustrator's Live Trace, and batch processing groups of images.
Why not start off the new year with a plan to organize all those loose files? It can end up saving you time and money, leaving you free to work on your other new year's resolutions.
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