Cumulus Desktop LE by Canto is a digital management product which helps you organize your images and fonts. It was included in the package of Corel Draw 9 and also in the Digital Camera Edition of Corel Photo-Paint.
This product supports more than 110 different file formats, including those of Adobe Photoshop. It helps you manage your digital assets. Indeed, this can be quite a challenge for professionals in the creative arts area.
According to Jason Taylor, President of Canto Software, such professionals seek an average of 84 of their digital images every week and, in over one-third of the cases studied, they were unsuccessful in locating them. According to Taylor, this failure rate can be reduced to less than five percent.
The Light Version (LE) of this product, which is bundled with other Corel software, is capable of cataloguing up to 2,000 items. Any of these can be dragged and dropped into your application workplace. In addition, Corel has developed plug-in filters for both Corel DRAW as well as Corel Photo-Paint, which will let you view your images as thumbnails before you insert them into your documents.
If you are a Mac user, you can use Apple Aperture to sort through your photo collection. When you are importing images from your camera, you get previews in the form of thumbnail size images. All images are placed into a “library file” and can be arranged into albums or projects.
One great feature of this program is that it provides you with a method of archiving your photos. It will let you know which images you haven’t backed up yet. This is a really important feature, because the challenge you face with storing digital photos, is that if your computer hard drive decides to die, you will lose your entire collection unless you have backed them up. Believe me, I have suffered through many hard drive failures over the years.
If you use a dual monitor, you can make comparisons between photos. This can be particularly useful if you are using a high-end camera and are taking multiple shots in quick succession. Aperture will also allow you to “stack” photos taken within 3 seconds of one another. This is a great way to keep your collection organized.
Aperture does not stop at the organizing stage. It provides you with some basic editing tools to crop, adjust for red-eye, straighten images and adjust balance and contrast. The program will let you convert images in RAW format to JPEG.
If you want to create images with small file sizes for e-mail attachments or for use on Web sites, Aperture will help you do this.
So that’s all the good news about Aperture. The bad news is that it only works on Mac computers, so if you operate in Microsoft’s Windows world, you’re out of luck and that’s a big shame!
Adobe Bridge owes its origin to being a file browser in Photoshop. It is now a stand-alone software package which acts as a control centre for all of the image files from different programs contained in Adobe’s Creative Suite.
It was first introduced in Creative Suite 2 and has since been enhanced for users of Creative Suites 3, 4 and 5. In spite of this, it appears that many people have a reluctance to use Adobe Bridge and Adobe has been trying to overcome this reluctance.
Adobe Bridge can be used in conjunction with the following programs:
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe inDesign
• Adobe Acrobat
• Dreamweaver
• Flash
• Fireworks
• Contribute
• FlashPlayer.
When you visit the “Bridge Centre” you can open up any recent files that you have created using any of the above programs. In addition, you can also save these files as a group, which is very useful when you have been using different programs which all relate to the same project that you’re working on. Another big advantage of using Bridge is that you can define the colours and their settings across all programs that you are using in that group. This is a powerful tool for colour management which allows you to control the colours in any specific project.
If you are working as a team on a project, Bridge Centre makes it easy for members of the team to collaborate with one another.
When you are in the Bridge Centre, you can scroll through the files that you have saved in Photoshop and rank them according to their useful characteristics in your project; all of this without actually opening Photoshop. Another feature of Bridge Centre permits you to look at earlier versions of your work simply by using “the version cue” feature. In this way, you have access to all the earlier files that you have created so that you can always go back and select an earlier version.
Bridge supports all file formats of Adobe including those of Adobe Acrobat. It is not necessary to exit Bridge in order to take a look at an Acrobat file. In the preview mode you are able to view all file formats which are used in Adobe Photoshop and you can preview them by using the zoom tool. In this regard a large monitor could help for viewing, since things can become very crowded on a small screen.
One of the biggest strengths of Adobe Bridge is the way in which it is able to handle Encapsulated Postscript (EPS) Files which are used in pre-press and in commercial printing. In order to convert files when you are in the Adobe Bridge, you simply drag them into the preview pane and you will see the introductory thumbnail. This is in contrast to looking at an EPS file in its native format since it can be very hard to discern what the files are about since a thumbnail can be very “pixelated” (i.e., jagged) and not clear. So, the advantage of working in Adobe Bridge is that you can click on the icon and get a larger image of the preview.
You can group photos or files. Thus, you can create a “Photo Stack” and drag and drop other photos onto that stack. You should note that the original files are not altered in any way when you place them into a stack.
One feature introduced in the CS3 version is the filter panel which lets you quickly locate files. Bridge Centre formerly offered the user access to over a million royalty free photos, however, this service was discontinued effective April 1, 2008.
At the time of writing, the latest version was Adobe Bridge CS5. To quote Adobe, “it is a powerful media manager that provides centralized access to all your creative assets.”