Adobe Lightroom vs Bridge CS3

I have often been asked the question from the title. In fact, I asked it at first. At first glance there is a fair bit of overlap between the programs. In reality each one was designed to be an aid in productivity for different work flows. So lets dive in and see where each shines.

When you first start to look at Bridge it will appear much like Lightroom. You can organize all of your photo's, tag them, open them in photoshop, and stack similar multiples. You can use 'collections' to set up search parameters that will be performed each time you click on the folder. It will download both .jpg and RAW files from cameras and convert them into Adobe's native RAW format of .dng, if you choose. It is a very powerful photo organizing and browsing program.

The power of Bridge is really not seen in just sorting and tagging photo's. Bridge is really intended to be a media browser. In Bridge you can view all of your media files. It will preview movie files in most formats, preview most formats of music files and offer thumbnail previews of all of the Adobe native file formats (InDesign, Illustrator...). Bridge truly starts to shine when you use it in conjunction with the other CS3 applications.

Take Encore for instance. If you pick a bunch of different photo's and open them in Encore as a slideshow, through the file menu, it automatically imports them and makes the proper slideshow file. If you simply import them as an asset you will then have to make the a slideshow, causing you an extra step.

Bridge is intended to be an intermediary program, between CS3 applications.

You may now be asking; "What is Lightroom for then?" I know that I did this at first. Lightroom duplicates much of the photo browsing and importing power found in Bridge. You can import .jpg and RAW files and convert to .dng. You can keyword and stack files. Lightroom really starts to show it's worth with photo's when you start to use it's other modules.

If you usually pull a photo into Photoshop to straighten the horizon line or to brighten it up then you need to look no further than Lightroom. The develop module in Lightroom offers you the capacity to fix dust and scratches, straighten the photo along horisontal or vertical lines, crop, and work with exposures and colour corrections. The best thing about all of this functionality is that it is not destructive. Lightroom does not make the edits to your picture directly but remembers what it has done and displays the photo with the edit applied. To get back to the origional all you have to do I delete the edits.

If you wanted to email a RAW file picture to a friend typically you would have taken it into Photoshop and saved it out as a .jpg file. With Lightroom you can export multiple files in a batch and to a folder. It will constrain proportions and reduce quality so that it is perfect for viewing on screen without being too big. You can batch process as many photos as you want at once.

Lightroom also allows you to set up contact sheets in it's print module, and export flash slideshows in it's web module.

For those who are taking lots of photos and need to edit, and tag them, Lightroom is the most useful tool. Now that I have Lightroom I open Photoshop half as much.