HOW TO BUILD A CONTACT SHEET

Adobe Bridge → Adobe Photoshop

Companion handout to Three Exposure Studies

What a contact sheet is, and why Bridge is where you make one

A contact sheet is one page holding every picture from a shoot at small size, in order, each one labelled. It exists so that a whole session can be judged by comparison instead of one picture at a time.

Adobe Bridge is the file browser that sits underneath every Adobe application. It is not an editor — it is where you find, sort, rename and hand off files. Photoshop does the printing; Bridge does the deciding.

Learn this route now: it is how you will select and hand off work for the rest of this course, and the naming habit in Step 2 is the reason the labelling takes two minutes instead of twenty.

Part 1 — Open Bridge and find your pictures

Open Adobe Bridge from the Dock, or from Launchpad if it is not there. If Bridge opens to somewhere unfamiliar, that is normal — it remembers wherever it was last.
In the Folders panel on the left, navigate to your pictures. If you copied them to the desktop, that is Macintosh HD → Users → [your login] → Desktop → your folder.
Set the workspace to Essentials — the word Essentials at the top right of the window. This gives you the Content panel in the middle, Folders and Preview on the left, and Metadata and Keywords on the right.
Drag the thumbnail size slider at the bottom right until you can see about ten pictures at once. Big enough to tell them apart, small enough to see the whole study.
Click one picture and look at the Metadata panel on the right. Open the Camera Data (EXIF) section. There are your aperture, shutter speed, ISO and focal length — written into the file by the camera at the moment you took the picture. Use this to check your Session Log.

If you cannot find Bridge

Bridge installs separately from Photoshop. If it is not on the Dock, open the Creative Cloud desktop app, find Bridge in the list of apps and press Open — it is already installed on the lab machines.

If Creative Cloud asks you to sign in, use your MVLA account, not a personal Adobe ID.

Part 2 — Select and order your pictures

You are building three separate contact sheets, so you will do this three times — once for the f-stop scale, once for the shutter speed scale, once for the ISO series.

Selecting

Click the first picture of a study, hold Shift, click the last. Everything between is selected.
To add or remove one picture from a selection, hold Command and click it.
Command-A selects everything in the folder. Useful, and dangerous when you meant to select one study.

Getting the order right

Contact Sheet II places pictures in whatever order Bridge is showing them. Set the sort before you build, or your scale will come out shuffled.

View → Sort → By Filename, ascending. Because you photographed the scale in order, filename order is scale order.
Check the arrow next to the sort menu at the top right — it toggles ascending and descending. Ascending is what you want.

Marking your keepers (optional today, required next unit)

Bridge lets you rate a picture 1 to 5 stars with Command-1 through Command-5, and colour-label it with Command-6 through Command-9. Then the Filter panel on the left will show only what you marked. You are not culling today — every picture in a scale belongs on the sheet — but get in the habit now, because the next unit runs entirely on ratings and filters.

Part 3 — Batch rename, so the labels write themselves

The trick

Contact Sheet II can print the file name under each picture. So if the file name contains the setting, the sheet labels itself.

Rename IMG_0412.JPG to S1_04_f16.jpg and the caption under that picture reads S1_04_f16. Do this once and Part 4 takes two minutes.

How

Select all the pictures in one study, in order.
Tools → Batch Rename, or Command-Shift-R.
Under Destination Folder choose Rename in same folder.
Build the New Filenames rows: set the first row to Text and type your study prefix — S1_ for the f-stop scale, S2_ for shutter speed, S3_ for the ISO series.
Set the second row to Sequence Number, starting at 1, two digits. Now you have S1_01, S1_02 and so on, in scale order.
Press Rename. Bridge shows you a preview of the first new name at the bottom of the dialog before you commit — read it.
Now add the setting to each name by hand: click a file name once, wait, click again to edit it, and type the setting on the end. S1_01_f7-1, S1_02_f8, S1_03_f11 and so on. Twenty-four names takes about four minutes.

Two naming rules that matter

Never put a slash in a file name. f/16 becomes f16 or f-16, and 1/125 becomes 1-125. A slash means a folder to the operating system and the rename will fail or produce something strange.

Keep the sequence number in front of the setting. That way filename order stays scale order even when the settings are not alphabetical.

Part 4 — Run Contact Sheet II

Contact Sheet II is a Photoshop command. There are two ways in; try the first, fall back to the second.

Route A — straight from Bridge

Select the pictures for one study in Bridge.
Tools → Photoshop → Contact Sheet II. Photoshop opens and the dialog appears with your selection already loaded.

Route B — from Photoshop, if Route A is missing

Open Photoshop. File → Automate → Contact Sheet II.
Under Source Images set Use to Folder, press Choose, and pick the folder holding that study. If all three studies are in one folder, put each study in its own subfolder first — it is faster than fighting the dialog.

The settings to use

Setting	Value	Why
Units	inches	Everything else in this course is in inches.
Width × Height	10 × 7.5	Matches a 16:9 slide closely enough to place cleanly, and prints on letter paper.
Resolution	200 pixels/inch	Sharp on screen and good enough to print. 300 makes a slow, heavy file for no visible gain at this size.
Mode	RGB Color	Screen delivery. CMYK is for the press work later this semester.
Flatten All Layers	on	Leave it off and you get a file with one layer per picture that will crawl on these machines.
Columns × Rows	Study 1: 3 × 2 Study 2: 5 × 2 Study 3: 4 × 2	Set it to match the number of pictures in that scale so there are no empty cells.
Use Auto-Spacing	on	Bridge spaces the grid evenly for you.
Rotate For Best Fit	OFF	Leave this on and some pictures come out sideways, which destroys the comparison.
Use Filename As Caption	on, 10 pt	This is what prints your setting under each picture.

Press OK. Photoshop builds the sheet. Do not touch the machine while it runs — it opens and closes every picture in turn.
When it finishes you have a new untitled document. File → Save As → JPEG, quality 10. Name it Lastname_S1_ContactSheet.
Repeat for the other two studies.

What to expect

On a full class of twenty machines this takes 30 to 90 seconds per sheet. If Photoshop looks frozen, it is working.

Rotate For Best Fit is the single most common thing to get wrong. If a picture comes out sideways, that box was ticked — close the sheet without saving, untick it, run again.

If the captions are too small to read, run it again at 12 pt rather than trying to fix it afterwards.

Part 5 — Adding the second label line

Contact Sheet II gives you one caption, underneath. Your assignment needs a second line above each picture holding the other two settings. Pick whichever route suits you.

Route	How
In Google Slides (recommended)	Place the finished contact sheet on the slide, then use the text boxes already positioned above each picture in the student template and type the values in. Fast, nothing can break, and the sheet stays a single clean image underneath.
In Photoshop	With the contact sheet open, choose the Type tool, click above the first picture and type the two values. Set the size to about 10 pt and the colour to black. Then duplicate that text layer for each picture — Command-J — and drag each copy into place with the Move tool, holding Shift to keep it level. Slower, but the sheet is then complete as a single file, which is how a professional would hand it over.
Fully in Slides (no Photoshop at all)	If Contact Sheet II will not cooperate, build the grid by hand in the student template: the picture placeholders and both label rows are already positioned. Insert → Image → Upload from computer, one picture per box. Hold Shift when resizing so nothing stretches.
Getting it into Slides In Google Slides: Insert → Image → Upload from computer, and pick your saved contact sheet JPEG. Hold Shift on any corner handle while resizing so the sheet is not stretched. A stretched contact sheet is an automatic point off on craft. Do not screenshot the Photoshop window. Save the file properly and upload the file.

Troubleshooting

What you see	What to do
Contact Sheet II is missing from the Tools → Photoshop menu in Bridge	Use Route B instead — File → Automate → Contact Sheet II from inside Photoshop. Nothing is wrong with your machine; the two applications sometimes lose the link.
Pictures come out in the wrong order	Bridge's sort order was not filename ascending, or your files are not named in scale order. Fix the sort, or finish the batch rename, then run it again.
Some pictures are sideways	Rotate For Best Fit was ticked. Untick it and run it again.
The captions say IMG_0412	You skipped the batch rename. Go back to Part 3 — it is worth the four minutes.
Photoshop says it cannot find a file	Something moved or was renamed after you made the selection. Reselect in Bridge and run it again.
The sheet is enormous and slow	Resolution was set higher than 200, or Flatten All Layers was off. Both are in the dialog; run it again.
Everything is grey and Bridge will not respond	It is building thumbnails for the folder. Wait for the progress bar at the bottom of the window to finish.

What you have just learned to do

This is not a one-off procedure for one assignment. Every one of these steps returns in the next unit and in the client work later this semester.

Browsing and sorting a shoot in Bridge instead of in the Finder — which is how you will handle every set of pictures from here on.
Reading EXIF to recover what the camera actually did, rather than relying on memory.
Batch renaming to a convention — the same skill that keeps a packaged InDesign job from falling apart at the printer.
Handing files from one Adobe application to another without exporting and re-importing by hand.
Producing a single reviewable document from many files, which is exactly what a contact sheet, a style guide and a pre-press package all are.