Using Adobe Bridge to create a pdf preview with watermarks

Adobe Bridge is the best way to automatically create a series of images for preview that are labeled and watermarked. To do this, start by putting all of your images into a folder. In this instance, I have created a folder called inkart vector art pdfs. The logic is this - Bridge considers the folder with your original artwork (or photography) to be the content. So the window that you are seeing below is what is inside of your folder. To select images inside the folder, click on them. To select them all, click on one, and then do a select all.

Once you see that they are all selected, go to the area off to the the right of your screen that says output. I am a creating a pdf file because I want all of these images to be watermarked. The web gallery won't do that, although it would be nice if it did! Like all Adobe programs, it makes more sense when you play with it than if I explain it all. The button that you will need to press whenever you make a change is Refresh Preview. Remember you aren't actually doing anything until you click save, which is at the lower right bottom of the screen. The best feature of this program is its ability to place a watermark on every image. That function is carefully hidden by the nice people at Adobe way down below everything else. You have to scroll down to find it. Like I said, I wish it was on the web gallery, but it isn't. Hopefully Adobe is working on that.

The watermark that I am having Bridge place on every image is the text © Inkart.net, which is the website for which I am doing this. You can select the font and size, so play with it a bit by clicking the button that says Refresh Preview. This may seem a bit of a hassle, but consider that you are telling Bridge to watermark all of the images, instead of having to put a watermark on the original art or photo. Pretty cool!

Another thing to select is filename, which is under Overlays. Why overlays? I don't know, there must be some logic somewhere! But again, it's worth fighting with this program, because it will put the filename under each image. Deselect extension, and it will take away the .jpeg or .tiff or .pdf. This gives a beautiful little label to every image. Be sure to write out the file name normally, with spaces, as it will be the caption that your client will read.

The whole process of working with Bridge is like setting up dominos, the fun part is when you click save and zoooom...! Bridge takes all of your images, lines them up neatly, watermarks them, labels them and lets you show them off. To see how it looks, go take a look at Roger Hall's wildlife artwork in vector format.