The improvements to workflow made possible by enabling Camera Raw to function outside of Photoshop will make life a lot easier for photographers. Likewise incorporating features such as Auto Adjustments, Crop, Straighten, and of course the very welcome Curves tool. (See Bruce Fraser's article on The Power of the Curve at PhotoshopNews.com)

 

Camera Raw 3 – Filmstrip Mode

 

Obviously, being standalone, Bridge has it's own menu options and keyboard shortcuts, many of which have been borrowed from its predecessor. This brings me to the one area of Photoshop that I’ve always been hopeless at… keyboard shortcuts and modifiers.

I'm not a keyboard junkie and my ability to memorise shortcuts isn't as good as it should be, so if I can use the mouse or a menu option to access a feature or tool I will. However, as the beta programme progressed it became clear that many of the workflow enhancements built into Bridge and Camera Raw 3 could best be exploited via the keyboard. Unfortunately, a lot of these shortcuts were not documented, that is until Thomas Knoll posted the list for Camera Raw.

As I found myself using these shortcuts on a more regular basis, I realised that the wider Photoshop community might find them as beneficial as I did, and so began the task of documenting all of the Bridge & Camera Raw shortcuts that I could find. Hopefully the two Adobe Acrobat PDF files that I’ve included here will help you get the best from Bridge and Camera Raw.

 

Download - Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw Shortcuts for Macintosh (1MB PDF)

Download - Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw Shortcuts for Windows (1 MB PDF)

 

Note: These pdf's will be updated as new shortcuts become known to me or when I discover an error (Revision 4 was uploaded 11 November 2005)

 

– July 2005

In late July 2005 Adobe released the Adobe Bridge 1.02 update. Whilst this update was primarily a "bug fix" it includes some additional keyboard shortcuts and modified the functionality of others, so I've updated the PDF's listed above to reflect these changes. So as to wet your appetite I've included the following screenshot, which shows the new shortcut to Show/Hide the Bridge side panels thus maximising the area available for viewing thumbnail. The shortcut is: Ctl+Alt+T (Windows) or Cmd+Option+T (Mac).

Tip: remember that you can assign your own keyboard shortcut for up to 7 custom workspaces (i.e. Ctrl/Cmd+F6 through F12)

 

Show/Hide the Bridge Side Panels