Using Bridge to make a portfolio or slide show (CS5)

Instructor: Ross Collins, North Dakota State University

Okay, now on to some more really cool stuff, of which Photoshop has a plethora (I always wanted to find a use for that word). Most photojournalists nowadays assemble portfolios of jpgs, submitted to prospective employers on a DVD for viewing in a web browser, or available directly from a web site. You could do this by hand, but such a chore, perhaps not very professional, and you have to know some web coding stuff. Or...you could have Photoshop do the whole thing for you! No webmaster fees required.

What does it look like? Check this out.

1. In Bridge, Assemble the photos or designs you want to use for your portfolio. (Or use the same practice photos you downloaded for the exercise above.) Click to choose each photo you want in your portfolio.

Hold down shift key to choose multiple photos; choose a whole line by just choosing the first thumbnail, holding down Shift, and choosing the last thumbnail.

2. Still in Bridge, choose Output. It's on the right side of the top menu bar. From that pulldown, choose Output again.

3. You have a choice of PDF or Web Gallery.

PDF is a good choice if you want to save and show your work to clients. It's not a good choice for the web, because it creates large files. You're better off with the Web Gallery, although keep in mind it's created in Flash. Some devices, such as the iPod, do not read Flash files.

4. Change the template, title, descriptions etc as necessary in the Output dialogue box (scroll down for more options).

5. Choose Save. Your gallery will be built automatically. Tah-dah!

Photoshop creates several files to make a web gallery work. One is labeled Index. That's what you click on to open your portfolio. Others have extensions as chosen in Options, images, and thumbnails. While you just put 'em on the desktop for now, in real life you'll want to save them all in one folder, so the links won't end up broken.