i’m sure some people here will ask why you don’t use cs2’s included camera raw feature?
Charles: Let’s investigate why you find BB better than the Adobe product in terms of being a "light table".
First off – ACR is not a file browser, it is a raw file conversion tool and as such, knocks spots off any other.
Photoshop’s "browser" is the stand-alone application, Adobe Bridge, which shops with CS2. If you don’t have Bridge, dig out your installation CD and reinstall. The "full" install, not "custom".
Some users find Bridge to be sluggish. However, if you set your system up correctly, Bridge will be everything you want a "light table" to be – and more!.
I assume you have at least 1GB of RAM. CS2 will work in less, but 1 – 2GB is optimal on a 32bit system.
In PS’s preferences, make sure Photoshop’s memory allocation is no more than the default 55%. Any more, and you will starve any other apps which may be running, of system resources. If this happens, the OS will start paging out to VM causing slow-downs. Remember – Bridge is a separate app.
When you first open Bridge and navigate to a folder, it will start building thumbnails and previews. To save this happening every time you move around your directories, point Bridge at the root of your images folder and let it "cache all sub folders". Let it run overnight if necessary.
Also, when you save PSD files in Photoshop, do so with "maximize compatibility" turned ON. This will allow Bridge to index and create previews much faster.
Bridge, ACR and Photoshop integrate together seamlessly. Open an image in ACR. Adjust white balance, exposure, shadow clipping etc., then click done, and these "edits" will be reflected in the Bridge preview. You can even crop the image and do tonally corrected B&W conversions in ACR – all non destructively – without even opening the image in Photoshop.
When you are ready to do your final edits/retouching/resizing/sharpening etc, simply shift-click the thumbnail in Bridge and it will open directly into Photoshop using the settings (bit depth, colour space and image size) from ACR.
Try it. I guarantee BB will be gathering dust in no time at all.
😉
Chris.
