One of the great things about Adobe Bridge CS3 is the many different workspaces that they have pre-built in here for you, and also the ability to actually customize a new workspace to specifically fit your needs. So let's go ahead now and take a look at some of the default workspaces that ship with the Adobe Bridge CS3.

The quickest way to access these workspaces is to come around here in the bottom right-hand corner of the Bridge interface and check on these little boxes down here, they are labeled 1, 2, and 3. Now in previous versions of Bridge you would have seen the specific workspaces actually shown to you in different icon form. For instance there was one for the vertical filmstrip, the horizontal filmstrip and for the default.

Now in Bridge CS3 we have the ability to click on these and choose from my fly-out menu from all these different types of workspaces. Now they also have keyboard shortcuts assigned to them so that you can quickly jump from one workspace to the other. So if you want it to, you could familiarize yourself with all these keyboards shortcuts and you have a much easier way of switching in between different workspace here inside of Bridge.

For instance let's go ahead and take a look now at the Light Table view which is just going to give you kind of a big slide-show type preview of all of your images here in this big horizontal pane. Now you don't get any of your metadata or filtering or any type of other panes here. So this is kind of a hindrance to me because I don't really like this particular view much for my work-flow. So let's go ahead now and take a look at some of the other workspaces here inside of the Bridge CS3.

By clicking on this little icon again. For instance let's go ahead and switch to the Metadata Focus and in this particular workspace you will see here that you get a full preview of all of the metadata that's associated with each individual image here. So if I scroll up and down you will notice that all of these images it shows the date created, the date modified, the size of the file, the document type, and it also shows all of the settings that were used for the particular camera that was used such as the ISO setting, shutter speed, focal length, and it also has the color profile associated with each image as well.

So this is a great view for analyzing image data. This is not actually good for previewing the actual content of the images. So in order to get a better preview of the images we are going to have to switch workspaces again.

So let's come down here and we will click on this icon again and let's try one of the Filmstrip views. These are usually useful for previewing images. So I'll select Horizontal Filmstrip or you can simply hit Ctrl+ F5 on the PC, Command+F5 on the Mac and you will notice here that we get this nice horizontal filmstrip at the bottom, and we have this large preview area up here at the top, and if I click on one of these images I get a nice preview of that image up there in that Preview Window, and if I cycle through all these images simply by tapping the arrow keys on my keyboard you will notice that we get a nice preview of each individual image as I cycle through here.

This is a great way for comparing images here inside of Bridge and then also a good way of analyzing specific images when accompanied with the new analyzing tools that Bridge has built into it. And we are going to get to those in just a few minutes.

So let's take a look now if we wanted to build our own workspace in Bridge because I really don't like this particular workspace because there is a couple of things missing. For instance I don't have my metadata panel and I don't have my keywords panel and stuff like that. So what we are going to do now is we are going to go ahead and we are going to create our own custom workspace and we are going to save that here inside of Bridge so that we can use it over-and-over again each and every time we use the program.

So what I am going to do first is I am going to reset this workspace. So I am going to click back on the icon and I am going to choose Default, or I could simply hit Ctrl+F1 on the PC, Command+F1 on the Mac. And that's going to take me back to the default Bridge workspace here. And what I am going to do is I am going to start building my own workspace simply by dragging and dropping these little areas of the Bridge to wherever I want them to be. So for instance if I want a bigger preview window all I have to do is take the Preview Tab, click on it and drag it over.

When I see that little gray bar up here at the top there or on Macintosh you would see - probably a dark gray bar or even a black bar here depending on the color of your user interface. When you see that black bar there you can just go ahead and you can drop that in. And when you do that you will notice the Preview Pane drops right on top of that Content Window. However the Content Window is still much larger than the Preview Window and its also taking up a lot of that screen real estate that I want to use for the Preview Pane right there in the center of the screen. So what I need to do now is move the Content Window. So let's just click on the Content Tab. We will drag it over, and we will drop it right on top of the metadata and keywords over here. So we will just take it, wait for that gray bar to appear and drop it in. So now I have this nice vertical filmstrip type setup for my Content Window over here on the right-hand side and I have my nice big Preview Window in the middle. So we are going to start now to move some of the other panels around here.

We are going to start by clicking on the Metadata Tab and we are going to just click-and-drag it over and we will place it at the bottom of the Filter Tab so that I have all of my information tabs over here on the left-hand side and I want all of my Imaging Analysis to be done on the right-hand side and in the middle. So let's go ahead now, we'll drop this in, that automatically adds it to the bottom and I also want to group my keywords with my filters because filtering and keywords in my opinion go hand-in-hand. So let's go ahead, now we will click on this, we will drag it over and we will just drop this in once we see the gray bounding box appear around the Filtering Window. So let's go ahead and we will drag this over, we will drop it in once we see that, and now those are docked together in a nice little group right there.

So now we have created a nice custom workspace here, and the last thing I am going to do is I am just going to adjust the size of my thumbnails over here on the right because they are just a little bit big. So I am going to size those down quite a bit and I am also going to drag in this side bar here, just so I have enough room so that I get a nice big preview here in the center of the page. Now if you wanted to get a whole lot more room, if you wanted to have that maximum amount of screen real estate there, simply mouse over that center bar right in between those two panels and then you will get this little double arrow that appears. And all you have to do is double-click when you see that and you'll automatically hide that Content Window. So that's going to give you a little bit extra space there.

This is specially handy if you are only working on one monitor and you're wanting to compare two images simultaneously. So now we are going to go ahead and we are going to expand that back out by double-clicking again and that's going to let us go ahead and bring back up that Content Window for us to have right there on the right-hand side so we can cycle through all of our images and then bring them over into our Preview Window to analyze.

So now that we have got all of our workspace setup. We have got our Metadata, down here underneath our filtering and keywords we've got our Favorites and Folders tabs right there. A huge preview in the middle and a large Content Window on the right.

Now we are ready to save this workspace so we can use at any time we want to here inside of the Bridge. So in order to do this I am going to come down here to the icons again. I am going to click and hold on this. Bring up this little dialog b