Quickly Adjust Photos in Bridge CS3 as if it were a Raw Image

Here’s another cool feature I found out about Bridge CS3 at the Creative License Tour; Open in Camera Raw.

Last weekend, I went on a little fishing trip with my friends and snapped some photos with a point-and-shoot camera. One wouldn’t really think to bother too much with processing photos from an average point-and-shoot camera, so I just imported the photos into iPhoto and left it at that. However, I took a couple of neat photos that I thought could use a little bit of touching up; this is the perfect scenario where “Open in Camera Raw” mode in Bridge CS3 works great.

Adjust Exposure, Shadows, Highlights, Saturation and More

If you’ve used Aperture or Adobe Lightroom, you might have adjusted a couple photos because the shadow/highlight balance wasn’t right, or the colors weren’t punchy enough. These are the type of adjustments you can make in the Camera Raw mode of Bridge. And unlike Aperture, you can make these edits not only on RAW images, but JPEGs, PNGs, TIFFs, whatever format Bridge recognizes.

To access this mode, just right click on the photo you’d like to adjust and select Open in Camera Raw from the contextual menu.

As you can see, you’re presented with the typical adjustment sliders as you’d find in Aperture or Lightroom. You can fiddle around with them and see the adjustments happen in real-time as it should.

See Your Sharpness Adjustments Even Better

To the untrained eye, it’s easy to overshoot how much you should sharpen an image. Here’s a trick that will help you see how much you are actually sharpening your image without the colors distracting your eyes.

If you’re adjusting the details of a photo in Bridge while in Camera Raw mode, you can have the photo you’re adjusting temporarily greyscale while you’re moving the sharpness adjustment slider. All you need to do is view the photo at 100%, and hold down the Option key while moving the adjustment slider to have the photo turn greyscale. This way, it is easier to see your sharpening adjustments.

You can also immediately see the changes from moving the Radius, Detail and Masking slider by also holding the Option key while the photo is being viewed at 100%

The Originals Aren’t Harmed

If you enjoy the security of knowing your originals aren’t modified when messing around with your images in Aperture or Lightroom, do know that Bridge follows the same principal in that it won’t directly modify the original image. When you press Done when you’re finished in Camera Raw mode, it actually will just save the settings in some hidden file, and the changes can only be seen when you open that image up again in Bridge.

To save the modified version of the image you adjusted, press the Save Image button in the bottom left to export it to another file, leaving your originals unharmed.