Alright, having made these changes, I have the option of opening this image and that will transfer the image into Photoshop. Open it inside Photoshop CS2 proper or you can just say done. I am done making my changes to this image, I would like to now return to the Bridge. That's what I am going to do, I am going to go ahead and click on the Done button. The amazing thing is, all of these adjustments that we just made are now reflected by the thumbnail inside the Bridge. We can see that these are all temporary modifications because we have these little icons down here, notice these? There is this little slider bar icon, they're supposed to be little tiny triangles underneath slider bars. That shows us that we have made color adjustments to the image.
The next icon which is a little Crop Tool shows us that the image has been cropped to this size right here, to this aspect ratio. Now an interesting thing to note and this is new inside of CS2, notice the Metadata Palette, if you can't see it, go ahead and click on the tab and twirl-open File Properties. I am going to enlarge this area just a little bit, so that we can see that this file was created on March 11 and I was indeed staying in Mandalay Bay on March 11, in case you are curious. The day the file was created was today for me, for you it will not show up as today because you are working on a different day than I am. However, the date the file was modified should say today. For me, it was just a few minutes ago, for you, it will be too. That may sort of alarm you, that may make you think, wait a second, I just changed this file. I mean, it says I changed the file. What you have really changed, however, is the Metadata.
Back in Photoshop CS, you used to have to save this kind of extra information as a Sidecar file that could get detached from the original file and create problems. Now all this Camera Raw information is stored to Metadata inside the image file. The image itself, the pixels are unmodified, they haven't been changed at all. They are just subject to some Metadata that will be applied on the fly the next time you open the image inside Photoshop or the next time you open it inside Camera Raw.
Now I am going to go ahead and switch to the Filmstrip View by clicking this little icon at the bottom of the window, so that I am seeing not only my little, tiny thumbnail but also a big version of the image. I can make that preview even larger by widening up this space that is afforded to the browser portion of the Bridge, so that I can see the wide angle view of Mandalay Bay here.
Now if you want to open this image again inside Camera Raw, you would just press Ctrl+R, once again to open it. Then, for example, I could get my Crop Tool. Notice that all my settings are still intact, my crop boundary is intact as well. I could just move this crop boundary, for example, a little bit to the right because I think it's sort of badly balanced at this point. I am not too crazy about the way it looked. I will move this side over to the right as well and then click Done, once again, to return to the Bridge. The Bridge updates the thumbnail in kind, so everything is happening dynamically here.
If I am happy with the last settings I applied as I am at this point, and I also want to open the image inside of Photoshop, then Shift+Double-click on the image. So press the Shift key and then double-click on the image and it will open directly inside Photoshop and bypass the Camera Raw dialog box as we are seeing right here. Now this file is officially detached from the original, even though it still has the same file name, it says MandalayBayView.dng. If I press Ctrl+S or choose the Save command, Photoshop will invite me, in fact, it will insist on saving the image to a different file format under a different name, and if you so desire, to a different location.
I am going to go ahead and cancel out and return to the Bridge by Alt+Tabbing my way back or Command+Tabbing on the Mac. You might also notice that we have a third icon down here underneath the words MandalayBayView.dng and that's showing us that the file is now opened inside of Photoshop. So a little page icon shows that the file is opened inside Photoshop CS2 or some other application and therefore, we cannot modify the image from the Bridge. We can't apply labels, we can't apply ranking information and so on and so on.
