This is too small a world—two photographers discussing digital workflow in the soy milk aisle. His evening I ran into Kim Zumwalt at the food coop—she had just picked up her copy of Bruce Fraser’s Camera Raw with Photoshop CS2 at Barnes & Noble. Mine showed up today from Amazon. It would have been so nice to have had this three days ago, before I processed 2000 images, but oh well. A quick scan of the book is already clearing up much of my fog about Bridge and the new RAW interface.
First off, the book makes a compelling argument for converting proprietary RAW camera formats to the open source Adobe DNG image format. The big advantage I see is to never again have to deal with those pesky sidecar files where all your edits are stored. DNG incorporates the adjustment data in the image file—all other formats keep the data in a separate XMP file that needs to travel with the image file. If you move your files around only in Bridge or Photoshop, the sidecars travel automatically. But Bridge is a truly lousy file manager. If you use anything else to move a file, you have to make sure you manually move the sidecar file too. Never, ever, however, select in the Preferences to keep the data in a central database instead of in sidecar files. It means your RAW adjustments will never travel into your back-up archive, or to any other computer.
Since I had to learn this new version of Photoshop eventually, I edited this massive University of Chicago shoot in Bridge. I don’t quite understand the implications of this (and apparently there are some), but Bridge operates on two modes, which explains my frustration about getting dumped into Photoshop inadvertently when I’m processing. If in Bridge you select a file and press Enter, you’ve opened the RAW convertor in Photoshop. If you open a image by double clicking, you’ve opened the RAW convertor in Bridge. Tomorrow I’ll be able to tell you what the difference is. Right now I haven’t a clue.
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