Creating a Contact Sheet for a photo shoot is one of the easiest ways to present your client a sheet of photo thumbnails so they can decide which ones to choose. Fortunately, Adobe created a more streamlined version of this process in CS5 by adding it directly in to Adobe Bridge under the Output workspace. In earlier versions, you had to create seperate JPEGs of the contact sheet in the Bridge menu Tools<Photoshop>Contact Sheet II. They are bringing it back in CS6 again but I like the new version because I can output PDFs directly from Bridge. Lets look at how to make a Contact Sheet in Adobe Bridge.
One of the ways to make your workflow more efficient when working with Raw files in Photoshop is to sync settings across multiple images that have the same setup like in a studio table top shot or even a portrait session. Using a gray card or similar like the ColorChecker Passport can make life even easier since you will have something to measure your grey balance with. Even if you don't have a gray card you can set the develop settings in one image and sync them to the rest of images with a simple command in Bridge. Lets take a look on how to do this in Bridge.
If you're using a gray card of some sort you want to get your White Balance set first. Select the photo with your gray card in Bridge and open it in Camera Raw by going to the menu File>Open In Camera Raw… (Command-R).
One of the cool features in Lightroom is the ability to create Collections of your photographs. Lightroom Collections are a way to group photos for easy viewing in one place. They can span multiple folders and different shoots so long as they are all in the same Catalog. They can also be used to display in a slide show, contact sheet or web gallery.
One of the next great automation tools in Photoshop is the Batch command. As the name implies, Batch will run a saved Action on a batch of files. It can be run on a set of files open in Photoshop, a folder of files on your drive or a selection of files from Bridge. Once started, Batch will run the saved Action on the files and will either save over the original files or save a new set of files in another folder specified by the user in the Batch window. Its a great way to process a bunch of files and perform some action to them. In this tutorial we'll run a saved Action we created in the Actions tutorial on a folder of files.
Batch can be performed from either the Photoshop menu File > Automate > Batch... or from Bridge in the menu Tools > Photoshop > Batch... The advantage to using Bridge id you can select certain files in a folder and not run the Batch on an entire folder's contents.
Lets take a look at the Batch window and the different options we have to choose from.
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