From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Opening files from Adobe Bridge - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Opening files from Adobe Bridge

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- [Narrator] While you can choose to open your images using Photoshop, many people prefer to manage their files using a separate application such as Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, or Lightroom Classic. Now, in Photoshop, we can use the home screen or the file menu to choose to open and then navigate to a folder and see the contents within that folder, but it's really quite limited. I can't see, for example, more than one folder, I can't move files around, and I can't add new folders or see a lot of metadata about each one of the images. So I'm going to choose to cancel, and instead, in order to manage my files, I'm going to use a separate application. I'll choose File and then Browse in Bridge. Now, if you're not using Bridge to manage your images, but you're using something like Lightroom Classic or Lightroom, then you can go ahead and skip this video. So Bridge is the separate application that you download and install as part of your Creative Cloud subscription. And one of the advantages of using Bridge is that it's a file browser and it can display all sorts of information about the files on your computer. So, regardless, we could be working with a logo created in Illustrator, an InDesign document, video or audio files, even a Word document. You can still see them all and manage them all within Bridge. So we would use this folder panel in order to navigate and view the contents of our different folders. When I click on a folder we can see the contents so we can view multiple images at once. We can actually move files by just dragging and dropping them between folders. For now, I won't do that. And we can also create new folders in order to organize our images. When we select an image, we can see it larger in this preview area, we can click to zoom in if we wanted to check focus, and we can resize any of these panels if we want to see one larger. We can view and edit information such as metadata about our images. We can even add keywords to images. We can create collections, filter our images to find them quickly, and even export our images to different file formats. Now, if I just want to open this JPEG, I can double-click on the thumbnail and it will open it into Photoshop. When I close the image, then Photoshop will return us to the home screen, but I can use the file menu in order to browse in Bridge to return to Bridge. I can also change the way the previews are viewed here. In this case, I want to zoom in a little bit so that they're larger, but we could also see more information by using the different view icons at the bottom of the window. Now, if you're working with raw files that have been captured with a digital camera in a raw file format such as NEF or CRW or DNG, then you can take advantage of the Camera Raw plug-in when you open the photograph. Here, I will double-click on the Tilted Icebergs.dng, and we can see that it didn't open directly into Photoshop, but instead into the Camera Raw plug-in. Here we have all sorts of tools to make edits. If I wanted to straighten this, I could select the crop tool and then rotate it in order to straighten those icebergs. I could also make color and tonal edits. Here, I'll just click Auto to have Camera Raw automatically enhance the image. We can make adjustments to the entire image or only a portion image, even remove distracting elements. And we're going to talk more in-depth about the advantages like making non-destructive edits in Camera Raw as well as the specific features later in this course. When I'm finished making my adjustments, I can click to open this file into Photoshop. Then, we could continue making additional edits like adding text or making a composite, but for now I'm simply going to choose File and then Save, and I'll save this as a TIF file back into the 01 Opening Files folder, I'll click Save, then OK, and then we can close this file. Now, when I return to Browse in Bridge, we can see the original DNG file with the adjustments that I've made as well as the newly-created TIF file. One little tip, you can also open JPEG and TIF files into Camera Raw to use the same editing features. You just need to select the file and then click on the Open in Camera Raw icon. That will open the JPEG and the TIF file into Camera Raw so that you have access to all of these options. For now, I'll go ahead and click on Cancel. We'll be talking much more about the benefits of Camera Raw in later chapters, but for now just know that if you work with several different file types, using a file browser like Adobe Bridge to manage your documents will enable us to quickly navigate and open many different file types in Photoshop.

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