Bridge CS3 offers a lot of important improvements over the Bridge 1.0 that was included in Creative Suite 2. Interface improvements, stacking, comparing, importing, and much much more have all been added, and Bridge remains an excellent cornerstone for a Photoshop Camera Raw driven raw-workflow. I covered most of the the new Bridge features in my Photoshop CS3 First Look book, but Adobe managed to sneak in one or two more before the final release of the software. Here’s one of my favorites.
post-production
Epson Stylus Pro 3800 reviewed
Over on Macworld.com, I posted a short review regarding Epson’s latest professional-level printer, the 17-inch Stylus Pro 3800.
The 3800 is a funny beast—it has the best print quality of any previous Epson printer, and it is priced in a place where it has no real competitor. There is no roll-feed attachment—17 by 22 inches is the largest standard size it will print on—and it doesn’t have the whiz-bang features that HP and Canon are putting into their pro-level printers, like automatic addition of paper profiles, a Photoshop plug-in, and fancy calibration tools. And, while it fixes the physical ink swapping found in the Stylus Photo R2400 and the Stylus Pro 4800, it still does have to go through a purge cycle when you go back and forth between matte- and glossy-finish paper types.
That said, print quality and repeatability are often what pro photgraphers want most, and the 3800 has that in spades.
Match Color in Photoshop CS2/CS3
With Photoshop CS2, Adobe added the Match Color feature which lets you alter the palette of one image to look like another. Match Color can be used for everything from slight tonal corrections, to ensuring that an image fits better with a design scheme or other imge. unfocusedbrain.com, a “blog with everything” has an excellent demo of how you can use Match Color in conjunction with famous classical paintings to perform dramatic color adjustments. Check it out here.