Why Use Adobe Bridge?

[bwcolor]

The upcoming Adobe CC offering includes PS, LR and Bridge. For those that use these three programs, what functionality does Bridge bring to the table that can't be duplicated by LR?

 

[segedi]

I've mostly stopped using Bridge since starting to use LR. If you don't use any other Adobe apps (like InDesign/Illustrator) I don't think there's much good reason to use Bridge. But you may be able to take a super large collection and better manage it through tags and such.

 

[Calzone]

Recently read a book called "The Digital Negative." In this book the author explains how LR5 was invented and evolved. In the history discussed it seems that LR took some ideas from Photoshop, but also invented certain improvements to make post processing easier, more logical, and user friendly.

A premise was presented that 95% of your post processing could be performed with LR alone and for that 5% of the time that Photoshop is required Bridge was developed as an interface with some additional organizational tools embedded.

It seems that all that is needed for most is really LR, Photoshop offers some advanced tools that are not available in LR; and bridge is the interface that marries the old and the new, meaning LR (new) and Photoshop (old).

It seems that Bridge has great organizational tools to help sort out workflow say if someone is making a book.

Hope this helps.

Cal

 

[jarski]

Lightroom has its own image catalog, so dont think it benefit much from Bridge. Photoshop is does not have one, so all catalog type work, such as metadata reading, changing and sorting requires Bridge.

 

[Dwig]

The upcoming Adobe CC offering includes PS, LR and Bridge. For those that use these three programs, what functionality does Bridge bring to the table that can't be duplicated by LR?

I use PS, Bridge, and LR. Each has their advantages.

I use Bridge frequently at work not because of anything it does that LR doesn't, but because of the things it doesn't do. Primarily because Bridge does not maintain a database. I find it vastly faster to use Bridge to quickly review and edit existing images' metadata (a frequent chore), do bulk renaming, and to send a group of images to PS for bulk processing using any one of several Actions I've created in PS.

Having to import everything into LR every time I create a new image variant is too time consuming for our workflow. I use LR to handle new digital images added to our image library, but once proofed and approved by the artist the print files are archived in folders by group and the image titles and sizes. Our printing method requires that we access the files directly from their folders. We can't print out of LR or PS so LR can't help us find and organize our production images.

 

[johannielscom]

Bridge? Don't have any use for it and never had.

Currently I'm abandoning Adobe products altogether and moving over to Darktable (LR substitute) and GIMP (Photoshop substitute). I'm on an older Mac Mini and both programs are available and very stable for OSX.

So far my experiments are looking real good, although dust-spotting scans in LR and PS still is a lot easier than it is in DT and GIMP. But maybe I need to practise more to get quicker at it.

At least I've found the DT equivalent of synchronising images in LR, and it's just as quick and easy.

To me, Darktable and GIMP might be the winners, since totally free and possibly equally effective!

 

[bwcolor]

Now I understand why I don't know much about Bridge. Thanks for the explanation.

Regarding Gimp and Darktable... I like Darktable. I'm guessing that it does 48 bit color..right? On the other hand, I thought that GIMP was 24 bit. At least that is why I didn't use it in the past.