With both Photoshop and Lightroom being available in the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan, James Abbott discusses whether Adobe Camera Raw and Bridge have had their day
When I first started using Photoshop seriously while still shooting medium format film and scanning my transparencies in 2005, knowing that digital photography was overtaking analogue, Photoshop CS2 was the current version of the software which was launched that same year. It was a huge upgrade from Photoshop 7, which is what I used to muddle my way around at university where film still reigned supreme compared to what digital cameras could produce in terms of image quality and file size.
The CS2 version of Photoshop and Creative Suite CS2 marked a turning point with the launch of Adobe Bridge, which was digital asset management software, which, for photographers, provided a place where you could organise, view, rate and open raw files in Adobe Camera Raw and other file types in Photoshop with ease, among other functions. It was essentially an early version of the Library Module in Lightroom. Adobe Camera Raw had been introduced with Photoshop CS1 back in 2003, and was finally complemented by a great way to view and manage photos – Bridge was a huge and welcome upgrade.
You may have noticed that I’ve talked about what Bridge can do in the past tense, and that’s not an accident: I don’t know any photographers who still use the software. I also can’t recall any photographers in the past ten years who have told me that they still use Adobe Camera Raw, whereas many amateur photographers I’ve met have told me that they only use Lightroom and have no need for Photoshop, despite subscribing to the Photography Plan, which includes Photoshop. So, it’s this, alongside my own desertion of Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw that got me thinking, are Adobe Camera Raw and Bridge effectively dead and, ultimately, pointless these days? There will, without a doubt, be some photographers out there using these software options, the law of averages dictates this. But I’m convinced that the numbers are already low in the grand scheme of things and continually dwindling.
Going back to my early Photoshop days, having Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw provided a great workflow at the time. And I have to confess that even when Lightroom 1.0 was released in 2007, I didn’t make the switch to Lightroom until the second version where features improved a little and made it a more worthwhile alternative. That was back in 2008, and since then I, like most photographers, have enjoyed the fluid workflow provided by Lightroom and continually improved features delivered with software updates.
