I took some time after class to work a little more with the workflow we learned on Tuesday. After going through about 500 photos with Professor Comfort, I spent about an hour going through the other workshops and my portrait package, familiarizing myself with the method through using it.
The Good:
I like the organizational structure. I am a naturally unorganized person but it is very instantly intuitive. I never really knew about Adobe Bridge or what it does, but familiarizing myself with it, Bridge has definitely become one of my favorite Adobe programs because of how easy it is to use off the bat. I think overall it is an extremely solid workflow and it just makes sense, which helps it become something that you can teach to a room of clueless students who can become experts on it within 30 minutes. Its very universal as well, and I can see how it can be altered for video or even audio work as well with just a couple of small tweaks. Obviously it works best for photos and works incredibly well even for large batches of thousands of photos.
The Bad:
I don’t have any real hangups with the method, I think that on the whole it is simple to grasp and works effectively at any level. The problems I have are mostly on the Adobe side, which I’m sure can be fixed with a little fine tuning. One, I made a custom export specifically for web exports on Bridge so that I wouldn’t have to change the settings every time. The problem is that the export location will always be the folder last exported to.
Example: I am exporting an image to 08272022_Pride/D_WebExports, the next photo I need to export is to 09072022_Assignment1/D_WebExports. When I go into my custom export settings, it automatically fills the destination folder with the Pride export folder, so I have to go and change that.
I understand that when you’re doing a project and using the same photos with the same destination it isn’t a problem, but I have already forgotten twice to change the destination folder and I’ve had to excavate my image from an unrelated project folder. If there is a solution to this it is not obvious, but that it just one gripe in a sea of positives. If there was a way to automate this process to always select the exports folder for the project that you’re in it would be great.
Overall, I would say that I have a very positive opinion of this organizational change. I feel like the structure has and will make me more productive and every time I go through photos in a project folder it inspires me to go out and take even more photos to work with.