No histogram in Bridge?

[john_Beardsworth]

Not sure how they do it but I'm sure that's where Adobe will put in some work and speed up the image display so that histograms and highlights alerts are available options. I certainly find them useful in Breezebrowser, where they are almost instant, and it's much less convenient having to go into Adobe Camera Raw, especially when the file contains a full size preview.

[brucefraser]

The Bridge previews (as opposed to thumbnails) are indeed built at Camera Raw default settings.

But they're also JPEG-compressed, otherwise the Bridge cache files would get unmanagably large, and as Ian noted, they're downsampled to 1024px, so a histogram derived from them would be pretty misleading.

I'm actually doing my initial edits in Camera Raw in filmstrip mode. That way I can see actual pixels, and I don't have to wait for Bridge to build previews before I edit. I can apply ranking directly in Camera Raw, and by the time Bridge starts building previews, I've already applied image settings. I can load several hundred images into Camera Raw with no significant performance hit, but it's a tad more practical to keep the camera's directory structure at this phase and load 100 images at a time.

[Nick_Rains]

Bruce, this is an interesting way of working, I think most people 'persevere' with Bridge and then go to ACR missing the fact that you can go straight to ACR with muliple images. This means that Bridge previews the images, taking lots of time and only giving a 1024px image, and then ACR previews the images again, but this time giving a full res preview if needed.

So, this begs the quesion, what exactly is Bridge doing that takes so long?

Other browsers take 1/10th the time to throw up thumbs, both Breezebrowser and Photo Mechanic are pretty much instant with the thumbnailing, even on big file like from the 1Ds2. Given the ibvious skill of the Adobe engineers, how come Bridge is such a sloth?

[brucefraser]

Bridge first reads the thumbs embedded by the camera (the image you see on the camera LCD). This is what other browsers do, then they stop. Bridge goes on to actually read the raw file, then downsamples it to 1024px.

One benefit of this that's often overlooked is that this phase actually verifies the raw file. I've seen plenty of corrupted raws where the JPEG was just fine. If the original has already been deleted from the camera media, it's beyond recovery. And if you want to use Bridge's slide show mode to do initial ranking, you need the high-res preview

But of course, opening the images in ACR verifies the image, and I can apply ranks from there. Several people have made a strong feature request for Bridge to provide the option of suppressing the high-res preview build until the user specifically requests it. I'm cautiously optimistic that they'll be heard.

Basically, Bridge is slower than the other browsers because it's doing things they aren't. But I'd be much happier if those things were under my control, so that it didn't waste time building previews until I need them. Meanwhile, opening the raws in ACR instead is a managable workaround.

[Nick_Rains]

Glad to hear that suppressing the previews is on the horizon, I posted this request in the Adobe forums a while ago, I was obviously not alone.

Photo Mechanic goes one step further in frugality and only thumbs the images on the screen. This is very effective and makes genuinely quick editing a reality.