An excerpt from the book “Working smart in Adobe Photoshop CS2”: “Bridge is great for watching files arrive in a folder. For example, if you’re processing digital camera photos or scanning image after image, open a browser window for the folder where you save your files. As they arrive, you can watch them fill the browser window one by one. Filmstrip is good for this purpose, because you can quickly check each file with a large preview, using the arrow keys to go from image to image.”

Conrad Chavez, who wrote this book by Adobe Press, is a trainer, an editor and a writer. His book is totally focussed on making Photoshop and Bridge work for you, instead of you working with these applications. The book contains the necessary examples, like a web page grid being set up to position design elements.

Selecting elements in an image gets the same treatment. Using many different methods, Chavez shows how to get results the fastest without buying additional filters or tools. Not surprisingly, the History and Actions features of Photoshop get a lot of attention too.

In the Layers area, Chavez advises to use Shape layers when working with solid colour graphics that you expect to manipulate before they reach their final form. The reason is that rotating, scaling and other transformations have no influence on the quality of those layers, as they are made up of paths entirely.

In short, when you want to get results in a very broad range of applications soon, and use Photoshop and the Bridge for most of your jobs, this book is a real eye-opener.