i second that opinion. i'm speaking from a mac perspective, but i'm sure it's close enough if you're using pc.
with cs3 when you click on browse images, bridge comes up. you can keep your pictures in any folder that you want (used to be a problem for me dealing with aperture). create any "tags" that you want. then simply highlight the picture and click off on the tags. now all your pictures are keyworded. looking for something? simply click search and type in your tags...
i usually always start bridge and not even go into ps unless i need to and then bridge will automatically bring it up. bridge is like your massive photo gallery and you do everything from there.
select a bunch of pictures and add your name to them, location or email, or any other information that you want.
if you're using digital, raw/jpeg, all your camera settings show up for each picture when you're browsing them in bridge -- wb, iso, f stop, shutter speed, focus metering, light metering...
when dealing with raw, when you click on the picture in bridge it doesn't start up ps right away, it opens it's own raw adjuster. here you can do crops, rotates (by simply dragging a straight line it will automatically ajust the photo and auto crop it for you), wb, and even curve manipulations, or pretty much anything else that you want out of the "adjust" menu you'd have in ps. from here you can save it directly into a jpeg format, or if you need to remove dust or anything else click continue and it'll bring it into photoshop for you to mess around with even more.
you can also do batch adjustments with raw files. select a bunch of them, adjust all your settings on the first picture -- curves, wb or whatever else, click done, it opens up the next picture, simply select "previous settings" and it'll apply what you did to the previous picture to this one.
as i wrote in my previous post, it's a great program and you can make it as simple or as complicated as you want. if you're dealing with all raw files and never need to remove any dust spots or anything, you can do everything (all wb, curves, saturations) directly out of bridge and export them into a jpeg without even bringing up the main ps screen.
i never dealt with lr, but i've used aperture which i'm assuming is somewhat similar and cs3 suite (ps + bridge) completely blows it away.
it does decent job exporting to "web" jpegs too but that has been around for a while now so i'm sure you know your way around it. you can also export to a website with templates and stuff, but i never use it since i use iweb.
they used to give out 30 day beta trial versions, i'd see if i could find one of those since the ps suite is pretty expensive.
niimo said:
Since I only use PS2 I have no idea about this. I would be curious to hear a "second opinion" on this though since it is pursuading, if true.
I use both PS2 and Lightroom. Lightroom to organize and batch edit, PS for more intensive editing, masking, cloning, adjusting, etc. I did try Bridge at first, but it just did not work well for me.
