Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
In this exercise, I'm going to show you how to make use of workspaces inside of
Bridge CS4. Workspaces are essentially panel configurations, how the panels are
setup. The reason that you are allowed to move the panels around and save that
configuration is because Adobe wants you to be able to work as efficiently as
possible. So you want to build something that works for you.
Now, located at the top of the screen up here are a group of predefined
workspaces. You will probably see more of them listed than I have listed. If it
gets truncated like this, you can click this down pointing arrowhead to see the others.
Keywords, Preview, and so on. Now, Essentials is the one that's selected
by default, and it shows you the Content panel in the middle, the Preview panel
on the right, and all these other panels over here on the left hand side.
If I switch over to Filmstrip, you can see a Filmstrip of thumbnails toward the
bottom; so this is a Content panel at the bottom of the screen, then we have
the Preview panel at the top. I'm going to go ahead and select Living on a
Heart Grunge.ai there. Another one that we have is Metadata, which
allows you to focus on the Metadata that's part of the illustration. Metadata
is basically all the extra stuff beyond the illustration itself, that's saved
along with a file. So the most obvious Metadata is just the File properties.
Like, when the file was created, what application was used, how big it is on
disk, the Dimensions in Points, the Dimensions in Inches, and so on and so on.
We also have this stuff that's called IPTC Core, which allows you to specify
author information, so that you can make sure that you are credited inside of a document.
Now, it's telling me that the Creator here is Dhanank Panbayum. By the way,
notice these little pencil icons, they show that you can edit this information;
most of the Metadata information you cannot edit.
But if you were to open the document, you will see the guy's name is Dhanang,
not Dhanank. So I'm not sure what's going on there. I'm not sure what that
disconnect is about. So if I press Ctrl+V, because it went ahead
and copied his name from the file, it's Dhanang Panbayum. Fine! So one is right,
one is wrong, I don't know, but I'm just trying to show you how you can go
ahead and change this information if you want to.
You can also change the Copyright information. I'm going to go ahead and scroll
down here a little bit to this Copyright Notice. Notice, I can't change the
Copyright status, but I can, just not from the Metadata panel, instead what
I have to do is I select this Living on a Heart Grunge file.
I go up to the File menu, and I choose this guy right here, File Info, or I can
mash my fist on the keyword and press I. The File Info dialog box is largely
editable, and you can see right here that there is a Copyright License option.
It says Copyrighted, Copyright Status is Copyrighted, and I can't change that
directly. Instead what I do is I can say well, it's Unknown, it's not
Copyrighted, and that would switch that out there. Or I could say it's Public
Domain, whatever it is I want to say I can assign that.
But in this case it is Copyrighted. Many of the illustrations that you send out,
you will want to mark them this way, especially if you are sending them out
to Art Directors or other folks for approval or that kind of thing, just
about any piece of artwork you create, you might as well give a Copyright statement too.
Then if you want to add your name as the Copyright Owner, I'm going to just
work over Adobe systems here. What you want to do is you want to enter a
copyright symbol. On the Mac, that's really easy to get you. It's Option+G for
reasons unknown, Option+G. On a PC, you have to dial in the code, the numerical
code for the character, and you do that by pressing and holding the Alt key;
press and hold it. Then on your numerical keypad, dial in sequentially, not all at once.
Keep that Alt key down, 0169, 0, 1, 6, 9. Then release Alt. Notice I get
a copyright character, just the way it is, 2008 let's say because that's
the year it is now. Then I just go ahead and paste this dude's name in here,
Dhanang Panbayum, and we are good to go. Then you click OK to accept. I'm going
to go ahead and click cancel, and we are done. Now, we did make a change. Notice that I made
a change to Dhanang Panbayum. I changed his name there. I could change his
Info right here too. Go ahead and spell his name what seems to be correctly.
I'm not sure; I don't know the man or woman, whatever. But let's say I make that
change there. Then I'll click on Apply in order to apply that Metadata information
to the selected file. The beautiful thing is I just edited the selected
file without harming the illustration at all and without opening it
up in Illustrator. So I didn't have to go through Illustrator in order to perform
this modification, I can modify Metadata right here inside the Bridge. That's
a function of being able to go to this Metadata View right here, this Metadata
Workspace. We have got other ones that you can checkout as well.
The other special workspace that I want to tell you about is this guy right
here, it's the Compact Mode. It's not technically a workspace, it's not known
as a workspace, but it does serve a similar function.
I am going to go ahead and click on the Switch to Compact Mode button right
there. Notice that it switches to this much smaller size. It will remember
whatever size you give it, so if you reduce the size of the thumbnails, it will
remember that. If you expand the size of the window a little bit, it's going to
remember that too. The primary advantage of working in this Compact
Mode is that, if you are working with Adobe InDesign and you are transferring
files into InDesign, you are placing illustrations, and you can just
do a drag and drop, just drag and drop in. You can also drag these items and
drop them into folders. You can do whatever you want. So you can interact with
other applications this way. By default, this Bridge in Compact Mode will
stay on top of other applications. If you don't want it to work that way, you
can go up to this little menu icon right there, click on it, and you can turn
off Compact Window Always on Top, and that will allow other windows to be on
top of it when they are active. Anyway, I'll leave that turned on for now.
Then to switch back to the Standard view of the Bridge, you just click on this
Compact icon again. You also have a keyboard shortcut incidentally, and that's
Ctrl+Enter on the PC, or Command+Return on the Mac, in order to switch back and forth.
So it's very handy. New to CS4, if you really want to make things
compact, you can click on this little guy, and all you have got is this Title
Bar to work with, and that's it. Anyway, I'm going to go back and switch to
the Big Mode right here so that I can see everything. Now, sometimes this
happens, InDesign, the Bridge has propensity to get a little messed up and misremember
how big the panels were, and tell you what I'm going to do. In the
next exercise, we are going to just totally switch things around, create a custom
workspace, and we are going to actually save that workspace for later use,
so that we can work as efficiently as possible here inside the Bridge.