Alright, so now let's start to take a look at exactly how we can use Bridge to analyze our photographs that we've taken. So let's go ahead now and we will start off. I am going to click on this top photograph here, this Flowers Orange-2.jpg and what I need to do is I need to zoom in on this file to check some of the focus areas of this particular image and one of the great new features of Bridge CS3 is this new Loop tool that allows you to magnify objects at unbelievable amounts of magnification. To activate this tool, you simply click right here in the Image window in the Preview window here and you will get this nice Loop tool that you can move around to check specific focal areas of the image. When you're using this tool, anywhere you see this little pointed edge right here, that's where the center of the Loop tool is going to be. So any time you need to point it towards something or you need to fit it to specific area, make sure that you have that pointed area right in the middle of the area that you are trying to analyze.

So for instance if I want to analyze this area up here, I would just simply click and move this up here, so that portion is in the middle and it is automatically right there in the middle of my Preview window. So, another cool thing about this is the fact that you can zoom in and out like I said before. And in order to zoom in and out, all you have to do is simply hit the Plus(+) key on your keyboard to zoom in and you can zoom in up to 800% on these images, which is really, really far, specially since these are lower resolution images here but if you press the Minus(-) key, you can zoom back out on the images and you can only zoom out to 100%, 100% is the default zoom for these images here using the Loop tool. So if you wanted to, you could zoom in up to 800% but actually viewing these at 100% is a great way of analyzing these nice edges here, especially for lower resolution files because if you get up into the 800% file with the zoom on lower resolution files, you are going to nothing but a mess of pixels and it's not going to help you all that much when you are checking sharpness or if you are looking for color accuracy and things like that.

So I would suggest staying within the first couple of zoom levels here when you are analyzing lower resolution files. For high resolution files, you can absolutely go up on to the 800% range because a lot of those are going to still be clear at that magnification.

Now let's say that you wanted to compare two images here inside of Bridge. Well it's very easy to do that now with the Bridge CS3 simply because they've put in here the ability to compare images side be side, so let's go ahead and close this loop window. I did that simply by clicking right in the middle there and if I wanted to compare these two shots of these orange flowers, all I have to do is shift click on those and I am able to compare those side by side, right there in the Bridge Preview window. However I am not really getting a full preview of these because they are so small, so how do I remedy this, it's very, very simple. I have an individual loop for each one of these images, so I simply clicked right there on those images and I had an instant Loop tool for both of those. Now one interesting thing about the Loop tool, if you happen to get too close to an edge, the Loop tool will rotate itself, so that you get more room and so that it accurately previews that area of the image that you're looking at right there, so that's a very cool feature in and of itself that recognizes the edges of the Preview window and it will automatically flip itself around so that you've a more accurate preview.

So now I can zoom in on these images like I said, up to 800% on either one of these images and I can place this cursor and say, I want to check the inside focus on the flower in this picture and I wanted to check the same on this picture as well. Now one thing that is rather limited with the Bridge is the Loop tools do not detect each other, so therefore if you have an overlap here, you just going to have to kind of deal with it because they don't detect each other and rotate themselves accordingly. That's just one of the little drawbacks here inside of Bridge, one of the things I hope to see in Bridge CS4.

However if you wanted to just view this Loop window behind that the one in front, simply close the one in front first, that way you can check the focus of this back image here and then you can automatically get back to that other Loop window, simply by clicking right there in front of it. So it's a very quick and easy way of analyzing your images and the getting the most out of your Preview Window by comparing images side by side.

Now another great thing about the bridge, let me close up these Loop window because we really don't need those anymore is the ability to group objects what we call stacks and this is a great new feature that is going to help you organize your photographs especially photos of the same type of content. Let's say you have a particular photo shoot like, for instance, all of these flowers shots that you see here in the content window over here. What I want to do is, I want to group these together into one big group. So, let's go ahead and we'll select all of these simply by Shift+Clicking to select all of those. They are right there in the Preview window. Again, let me reiterate here that you do have an individual loop for each one of these images. So, if you wanted to see the Loop tool in action on every single one of these you could but that's not exactly what we're doing in this particular demonstration. So, I'll go ahead and put the Loop tool away there.

But now what we're going to do is, we are going to group these together. In order to do that, let's come up here to the Stacks menu and we'll choose Group as Stack or you could simply hit Ctrl+G on the PC, Command+G on the Mac and when you do that, you'll automatically get this little 3-D box type thing up here, that allows you to have those in a nice orderly group, which you can open by clicking this little number right here. You could open those to analyze all of the different images that went in the stack, you can also reorder the images here inside the stack which will allow you to then have that image as the front image for that stack, you can also select only that front image to only view that image, or you can select the entire stack by clicking this little back portion, which will then go ahead and select all of the images in the stack allowing you to view all of them simultaneously here inside the Preview window. So this is an amazing little tool that's going to help you organize and keep all of your files sorted out, so that you have individual photo shoots and everything like that grouped together, so that you don't confuse them with other images that you might have over there in the Content window.

Now if you wanted to view these images in sort of a Makeshift Slideshow mode, simply mouse over the stack itself and you should get this little scroll bar up here and inside that scroll bar, you should be able to click-and-drag though, just like so to see each individual image here in the Content window. Now it's a really tiny preview and I don't see that it's going to help you a whole lot but at least then you'll be able to get some what of a preview of what's inside the stack without actually having it expand it all out. So this is just another way that you're building in there to help kind of speed up your workflow, if you are looking for a specific photo that might be lying deep inside of one of these stacks that you've created because there's really no limit, as far as I know, to the amount of images that you can put inside of one single stack. So you can have thousands of images in a stack and it's very easy to find one, once you have the ability to cycle through there with that little scroll bar.

Now another thing that's kind do helpful, although not so much with this particular stack simply because we don't have that many images in it. But let's say you have a couple of hundred images here inside this stack, you can see how this could be parti