Monday, February 11, 2008

Drag and drop tricks with Bridge

One of the most useful features of Adobe Bridge is the ability to drag and drop assets (images, artwork, logos, and even text files) from Bridge into other Creative Suite programs, including InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks, (as well as Word, Powerpoint and Publisher).

To make dragging and dropping easier, switch to “Compact Mode” in Bridge by clicking on the compact mode button in the upper-right corner of the window or hitting command-return (Mac) or ctrl-enter (Windows). This does three things:

1. It causes the Bridge window to stay on top of all other windows

2. It returns the Bridge window to the previous size and location from the last time you entered Compact Mode

3. It hides all other Bridge Panels except for the Content panel.

Here's another neat trick: Say you have a Photoshop file open, you're browsing through some images in Bridge, and you locate one that you want to add to your Photoshop file as a new layer. Unfortunately, you can't drag and drop from Bridge into Photoshop. But if you select an image in Bridge CS3 and choose File > Place > In Photoshop, the image will be added to your existing Photoshop file as a new Smart Object layer.

3 comments:

Caleb said...

Great Tip! In Mac OS X you can set a keyboard shortcut via the OS X system preferences keyboard & mouse settings. Simply set a new shortcut for Bridge as "In Photoshop" and pick a shortcut....works great

Keith Gilbert said...

Caleb, I didn't know that you could add a shortcut to an application's menu items in OS X. This does work great (at least in OS X 10.4 and 10.5 -- I don't know how far back it goes). Thanks for sharing this tip!

Unknown said...

I tried doing the file>place but the image gets very pixelated when it is inserted into PS CC? it is 3.5 MB in size so the quality is fine...