Every great once in a while something will come along that is just so cool and so useful you just have to sit back and say WOW! RapidFixer for Adobe Bridge CS3 is just such a product. This small script that you install in to Adobe Bridge CS3 does something so amazing and so useful all I can say is WOW!

RapidFixer allows you to select images inside of Adobe Bridge CS3 and then make Adobe Camera Raw adjustments to them without, that’s right without having to go in to Adobe Camera Raw or Adobe Photoshop. RapidFixer puts up two bars one at the top and one at the bottom of the thumbnail (content) section of Adobe Bridge CS3. On these two bars you will find the most used Adobe Camera Raw features. Things like white balance adjustment and white balance preset selection, to exposure, fill light, clarify, curves and more.

Simply choose the image or images you want to adjust and then click on the appropriate buttons on these bars to adjust the images to your liking. The chances you make are applied quickly and the selected thumbnails update to reflect these changes.

Note: Adobe Bridge CS3 2.1 has a bug in the caching system. Unless you have the thumbnail size set to a certain size (about middle way on the thumbnail size slider at the bottom of the screen) the thumbnails do not update correctly. Just make sure you have your thumbnail size set large enough and this Adobe Bridge 2.1 CS3 bug just doesn’t happen (Bridge CS3 2.0 doesn’t have this bug). Adobe is aware of this bug in 2.1 and is working on it.

Once RapidFixer is installed you turn it on by going to the Edit menu and then at the bottom is a new menu option called RapidFixer in this menus sub menu you have two options Large (1280 wide) Screen Shot and Negative Screen Shot. Once you select one or the other the bars will come up in the thumbnail (content) section of Bridge. At this point when you go to the Edit menu again you just have the option of showing RapidFixer or hiding it. The only way to get in to the Negative mode after being in the regular mode or vice versa is to close down Bridge and reload it. This is a limitation of the scripting capabilities and not a problem with RapidFixer.

Controls in the regular mode include: apply default camera raw setting, covert to black and white, white balance preset, temperature, tint, split tone, vibrance, saturation, blue HSL, orange HSL, manual toning, auto toning, exposure, highlight, fill light, blacks, contrast, clarity, vignette, parametric curves. The controls like temperature, tint, exposure, clarity, etc. have five buttons one that increase the effect in a large increment, one that increases the effect in a small increment, one that resets it to the default amount, one that decreases it in a small increment and one that decreases it in a large increment.

The negative mode allows you to convert and adjust film negatives. You have many of the same controls in this mode as you do in the regular mode. While you have been able to convert film negatives to positives in ACR by simply inverting the curve the down side was that the other controls in ACR were then backwards so the exposure slider when slide to darken an image in a regular color image would now lighten the image when you slid it in to the darker direction and this is because you inverted the image. RapidFixer’s controls are correctly labeled and so darker darkens and lighten lightens the image. Controls in the negative mode include: apply camera raw default, auto tone, negative range, negative curve, split toning, parametric curves, exposure, fill light, HL flatten, HL boost, contrast, clarify, and vignette and midpoint.

I have to say this is a brilliant little program and worth its weight in gold. It is definitely worth the $49.95 they are asking for it. I can’t recommend it enough.

Needs

• Any PC capable of running Adobe Bridge CS3
• Adobe Bridge CS3