Solving the Problem with Colored Label Appearance Between Lightroom and Bridge
I love Photoshop CS4. I’ve been using it since the earliest beta release and I’m quite happy with the direction the development team chose to go. However, I do have a few pet-peeves. One of them is the way the colored labels are now set up by default in Bridge CS4 that’s causing problems for Lightroom users. I know this is causing a problem because today I worked with two different people today who were dealing with it.
Here’s an example. After shooting the photos below at Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona, I sorted and labeled them in Lightroom. The photo of the solar telescope on the left has a red label, the photo in the middle has a green label, and the photo on the right has a yellow label. Unfortunately, when viewing these photos is Bridge CS4, it’s difficult to see which color is applied to each image because all of the labels are white. This is happening because of a silly change to the preferences in Bridge CS4.
Colored labels added in Lightroom are white when viewed in Bridge CS4.
There’s a cool customization you can do in the Bridge preferences that allows you to use custom names for the colored labels. Some photographers take advantage of this by changing the name of the labels to something meaningful. For example they change the name of the red label to “Delete” and the green label’s name to “Keeper”. That way it’s easy for everyone involved to know that the photos with red labels are to be deleted, and the photos with the green labels are to move forward through the workflow.
This is a nice feature when you set it up to work with your workflow. However, this feature can cause unintended consequences when working with labels added in Lightroom, causing them to appear white when viewed in Bridge CS4.
I know what you must be saying by now, “I didn’t change the names of the labels.” You didn’t have to. Adobe did it for you. Now in Bridge CS4 the default names for the colored labels are the names shown below. Maybe they are useful to someone, but I personally don’t know anyone who uses this system.
The new default names of colored labels in Bridge CS4.
When a label is added in Bridge, these new names don’t affect the appearance of those labels in Bridge. But when the labels are added in Lightroom, it causes the problem because this isn’t the same naming strategy that’s used for colored labels in Lightroom. They’re named for their colors (red is Red, green is Green, etc,) which is the same way it used to be in Bridge.
Fortunately, it’s easy to fix this problem. Choose Adobe Bridge CS4 > Preferences (Mac), Edit > Preference (PC). Then select Labels from the menu on the left. When the Labels preferences are displayed, replace the default names by typing the names of the colors into the text boxes beside each color (as shown below) and click OK.
Replace the default titles with the name of the color.
Here’s a bonus tip! If you deselect the “Require the Command Key…” option at the top of the dialog, you can change the Bridge keyboard shortcuts for appling labels to use just the number (without holding down the Cmd/Ctrl key) to apply labels. This change makes the shortcuts match Lightroom’s colored label shortcuts, which is handy if you use both pieces of software.
