It’s a between-episode-week for dekePod today, so I thought I’d provide you guys with something different to stimulate your video appetites: an episode of O’Reilly’s screencasts on “Photoshop CS4 for Photographers.” By different, I mean two things, 1) this particular screencast covers a variety of photography-centric topics and 2) you’ll find the author/narrator has a slightly different presentation style than our fearless leader. Think “comforting dram of aged whiskey” next to Deke’s “energizing double-espresso.” If you like what you see, you can subscribe to the series here. (By the way, interviews with Deke have been known to pop up there as well.)

This week’s episode is on Collections, a feature of Bridge that Adobe will tell you was available in CS3, but seriously, Adobe, collections in CS3 did not in any way resemble the powerful feature of CS4. You can use collections to make virtual sets of images, leaving your basic file structure intact and yet pulling together sets from across different folders that represent events, subjects, or perhaps just your best images. Collections are one of those features that make Bridge/ACR/Photoshop workflow a viable digital asset management system (provided you don’t shoot gazillions of images or need to manage said images offline.)

The previous week’s episode featured a good overview of how to use Photo Downloader to efficiently bring your photographs in from your camera. There’s a lot you can do during that one simple process that will make your life easier, and your photos easier to find, down the line, like attaching your copyright straight out of the chute. Watch the screencast to see the additional features when you venture beyond Photo Downloader’s standard dialog box.

By the way, one question came up last week when Derrick was presenting this info live at PhotoPlus. The Advanced dialog gives you previews of the images on your card to choose from during download. One of the audience participants asked whether or not you could use Shift and Command/Ctrl in their traditional fashion for selecting images, i.e. if you could Shift-click to select a set of contiguous images from the card. The aswer is yes, but there’s a small hitch. Once you click to select the first image, and then shift-click to select the last in your desired group, you must also turn on the check box of one of the items in the selected set. So let’s say I wanted to download all these self-portraits of me and Photoshop CS4 One-on-One bonding at PhotoPlus. I’d click the top-left, then shift-click the bottom right, then make sure I checked one of those check boxes.

It doesn’t matter which check box you click. And if you turn off the check box for any one of the selected set, they’ll all turn off as well. Simple trick, but one that seemed appreciated by more than one member of the PhotoPlus audience.

The series continues for several more epsiodes in the ensuing weeks.