Bridge, originally uploaded by bourgeoisbee.

Since my laptop died a horrible death on Monday and I was forced to reformat I have been thinking about the work flow I use for editing when I am out and about.

I try to NOT edit images on my laptop, reserving that solely for the desktop, but when I travel I need to be able to easily edit any images I take during the trips.

Lightroom is a great tool, but it’s a pretty “heavy” tool. I am trying to keep the laptop in a basic form with only the must have/needed tools installed.

Well last week during my Photoshop class we were introduced to Adobe Bridge and Camera RAW. I started calling the combo Lightroom Lite.

For the most part Bridge and RAW do what Lightroom does, they just happen to be included with Photoshop. So if you have PS CS2, 3 or 4 installed you have these tools already to go.

Camera RAW allows you to do the same adjustments of the things you can in Lightroom and even allows you to run Photoshop actions on your files without opening Photoshop.

Bridge does one thing that Lightroom doesn’t that I feel in love with…it helps you manage your complete workflow/file system with the click of a button.

You can take a set of RAW images and have Bridge save them out to your file system as a RAW, PSD and JPG with one click of a button.

May seem simple, but it helped me immediately establish a new filing system for my images that is super easy to follow when I am on the road.

Bridge will let you name the folders you save to, so I can have a folder for each days images with folders for the RAW, PSD and JPG files inside automatically.

For now I am going to stick with this combo on my laptop and leave Lightroom for my desktop duty. It should make copying the files over to Lightroom when I get back home from trips a snap.

When you are shooting a room with a great view, it is a good idea to show that view, if you can. But that is more complicated when you think about the exposure levels outside versus inside the room. Since I was in an awesome location recently (the Park Hyatt in Beaver Creek, Colorado), I decided to use the property to do some practice on. I have posted a few images from this test in the Photography For Real Estate Flickr group (yes, it is a Flickr complement to Larry Lohrman’s excellent site/ blog) and have received some useful feedback from it.
Read the rest of this entry »