Secrets of Adobe Bridge

Terry White’s Secrets of Adobe Bridge is a fine primer for learning Adobe Bridge, but true secrets are conspicuously absent.

Just got done reading Terry White’s Secrets of Adobe Bridge: Making The Most of Adobe Creative Suite 2. One of my new goals for this year is maximizing my production with Bridge and Version Cue, and though I’m pretty familiar with Bridge and how to use it I decided any book offering “secrets” would raise my skills. Unfortunately, I was somewhat disappointed.

Secrets of Adobe Bridge is a fine book, don’t get me wrong. Well-designed, readable, and Terry White’s writing style is clean and with a bit of humor (Scott Kelby’s influence, no doubt). If you don’t know Bridge from a bridge, then you will eat this book up. But if you’re a power user who already knows what Bridge does or have even worked with Bridge off and on, then the book will seem like only a review of old material. And the book is only 100 pages, so there’s not a whole lot there to begin with (compared to some other Photoshop books).

NO SECRETS?

My big complaint is the promise of “secrets”. White is Technical Resources Manager for Adobe North America and a respected trainer, so I snapped this book up thinking of all the secrets White would reveal from the bowels of Adobe Bridge. Big disappointment. There’s plenty of good information but very few true secrets, tips and features that make you say, “Ah!” and stick in your memory. There are a few:

• Rate and label your images during a Slide Show with Cmd/Ctrl and 1–5 for ratings, Cmd/Ctrl and 6–9 for labels.
• Drag and drop a folder from your desktop to Bridge’s Preview palette to preview its contents immediately.
• Bridge can view not only graphics and page layouts, but auxiliary files such as Illustrator color swatch libraries.
• Navigate to the file and you’ll see the swatches in the Preview palette.
• Bridge has several Photoshop scripts, but unfortunately nothing you can’t do already in Photoshop. Not so with Illustrator and InDesign scripts, which allow batch Live Trace in Illustrator and editable contact sheets in InDesign.

Unfortunately these are most all the secrets you’ll find in Secrets of Adobe Bridge; the rest of the information is basic stuff.

BEGINNING TO ADVANCED

This is what’s on the cover under “Book Level”, but I’d have to say “Beginner to Intermediate” is more appropriate, or even just “Beginner”. That’s not to say this book is bad: a true Bridge beginner will be awed by the application’s features after reading this book. But to more experienced users this stuff is just old news.

Secrets of Adobe Bridge : Making the Most of Adobe Creative Suite 2 (Paperback)
by Terry White
$15.74 at Amazon.com
120 pages
Publisher: Adobe Press