An introduction to batch processing with Adobe Bridge

- Adobe offers basically its own operating system. It's called Adobe Bridge. And it's a robust tool for browsing images and doing lots of common tasks. There's a lot of actions built-in that let you do things like make a web gallery or a contact sheet, and it's really quite useful. Let's take a quick look. With Bridge, you get the ability to navigate to folders of content. And there's a lot you could do from here. Now let's not take a full look at all the features but I want to point out a couple of things I really like. For example, with an image selected if you press the space bar, it's easy to quickly preview the file. And with a single click on the image you can zoom to a hundred percent. So you could easily judge the sharpness of an image making easy to evaluate things like critical focus and exposure without having to open up each file. Click again, and it zooms back out. This makes it easy to preview content. Let me show you a few of the automation features. If I select a group of images, first up I suggest you choose tools, batch rename. This makes it easy to perform some of the renaming tasks we talked about before. You'll notice that there's some templates in here to make it a bit easier, but this allows us to build a custom name. For example, I can call this desert and then allow an underscore for the date created. And then an enumerated digit here using a multi-digit numbering system such as a three-digit numbering scheme followed by the file extension. I'm also going to preserve the original file name in the metadata. Now when I click okay you'll see that all of the images take on the new naming structure, which is great. In this case, a name of the project the date that they were originally captured and an additional unique number. But if I ever need to, and I choose batch rename you'll see that you can actually go in and restore these. So let me go back to default for a second here. And you'll see under the different options include the ability to use the preserved file name as well as many other naming structures. This is quite robust. Additionally, under the tools menu you'll find a lot of other batch processing capabilities, such as the batch processing here in Photoshop to make options like a contact sheet or to batch process or the useful image processor we'll explore later. You also can switch to the output workspace. This workspace is all about creating content. Here you'll see some very useful output modules, notice for example, that I've choose the ability here to output content and effectively build a contact sheet. What I could do here is look at these different templates and you see that we could create different styles here such as a matted print or a contact sheet. I'm going to go with a four by five contact sheet and set the page size to match a US letter size. Notice I could set the target resolution and other options. Plus what's really cool is this is interactive. So you could actually start to add the files in the order that you want to display them. Or if you're feeling lazy, you can just grab them all and drag and drop and you see that it creates the multiple pages. Like you see here. This makes it simple to lay it out. Now in this case, I had a few of those images in there multiple times. So let's just go ahead and remove those since I dragged them in individually and then as part of the group. And what you'll notice is that the page dynamically updates. If you decide to, you could adjust the overall settings here for quality as well as what sort of caption or other information appears. Looking at these other output modules here you'll see that it's not just building this. For example, if we chose the maximum size option here we could still do some cool things. For example, flipping this to a landscape orientation and setting the page size here to match something like a custom display. So let me go with pixels, and I could say fit this to 1920 by 1080. And now it's 16 by nine. And we could set that background to black and you see effectively what we've just built is a simple slideshow. Which works quite nicely. As you scroll down here, you'll see there's additional options including the ability to assign footer and header text, and the ability to add a watermark to your images If you need to. Additionally under PDF properties you can control things such as forcing it to open into full screen mode, and to automatically advance every three seconds and even apply a simple transition such as a fade. You can assign passwords too. Let's go ahead and export that to PDF and I'll set that out to my desktop for now. And I'll call it slideshow, and save. You'll notice that it builds the custom contact sheet out of all of the slides. And I could force it to open up. In this case, it loaded it into the browser. Let's go ahead and actually go to that file directly. And I'll open that up. You'll see for example if we open this image up into Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat Pro it invokes a full screen preview. And now automatically every three seconds it does a simple fade transition to the next slide. These can contain text for captions and using the arrow keys I can also manually control this presentation If I wanted to step through. As you you see, it gives you great opportunity to present content in an interactive slideshow without having to step outside of Adobe. Now I do have a full length class available on Adobe Bridge and I encourage you to check it out. It's particularly useful if you work with multiple Adobe applications that's because Bridge is actually integrated into several of the creative cloud apps. It makes it really easy to hand things back and forth between apps and to save time on common tasks.