Edit Non-Destructively with Smart Objects in Photoshop | Day 13

welcome back to 30 days of Photoshop today I'm going to show you how smart objects can make a huge difference in your workflow hey there and welcome to phlearn my name is Aaron NACE you can find me on a phlearn comm where we make learning fun and as a part of our of 30 days of Photoshop series which I hope you're enjoying so far by the way I'm having a fantastic time with this series we're jumping into smart objects now these are an essential part of working non-destructively in Photoshop and here's a couple reasons why you'll want to start using them today so smart objects work by creating a reference of your image so any changes that you make to that image become non-destructive we're going to show you how changing the size of your image going from a large image and shrinking it way way wasteful and then blowing it back up again won't lose any resolution when you use the smart object versus when you use a regular layer you're gonna lose a ton of information smart objects also allow you to use smart filters which can be undone at any point in time making any filter non-destructive we got an awesome tutorial for you let's jump into Photoshop we're gonna start off by opening our images for today we've got four different photographs and you can actually download these on phlearn calm just follow the link right down below so you can follow along with this episode so the first thing I want to do is just make these a little bit smaller I'm just gonna zoom out on them so I'm gonna hit ctrl or command minus a couple of times there we go and I basically just need to be able to see all of my documents at the same time okay now everything looks pretty good I want to go ahead and get all of these images into one document so I'm gonna use my move tool and we're just gonna click and drag from one image to another there we go you can see it's transferred and then I can just close that one out cuz I don't need it anymore there we go let's quote close that out and bring this one over here finish it up now we're gonna hit f4 fullscreen and go ahead and zoom in a little bit so at this point we have a few different images and I want to put these together in sort of like a like a collage or album type thing so I need a little bit more space in this image so I'm actually gonna go with a square crop so let's go ahead and hit for the crop tool now where we have our width and height resolution I'm gonna choose a 1 to 1 square ok and in this case it's actually showing me a lot of other information we have in this photo but we're gonna go right up here the top and then stretch it down to the bottom make sure that where it says delete cropped pixels is unchecked and we won't delete anything without you wanting it gone ok now this looks fantastic just start this off I know we're gonna resize a couple of these different layers you know what we can go ahead and crop this in a little bit smaller there we go something like that looks pretty good now we're gonna resize a couple of these layers so let's go ahead and choose this image as our starting point to show you one of the key benefits of Smart Objects so I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate this layer we're gonna hit ctrl or command J to duplicate it and we'll just bring it right over here so this layer I'm gonna turn into a smart object and it's incredibly easy to do which is a right click on the layer itself and go to convert to smart object okay so you have a little smart object icon right here on the bottom right of your thumbnail that's let's you know it's a smart object and then this layer has no icon so it's regular layer all right I'm just gonna type in regular and smart and now I'm gonna apply the same exact transformation to both of these layers and we can see how they do comparing a smart object versus regular layer so let's go ahead and hit controller command I'm gonna click on both of those keep in mind it's just a carbon copy of that layer we're gonna hit ctrl or command T which is our transform dialogue and I'm gonna just stretch these way way way small okay we're just gonna make them absolutely tiny I'm exaggerating a little bit here I know this but I want to show you what the difference is between regular and a smart object click on the two of them ctrl or command T and then we're just gonna click and drag I'm gonna hold shift so we maintain our aspect ratio and then drag those up again okay now before I actually hit enter you can see a little preview of both of these this is basically how many pixels we have left after making it small now Photoshop is gonna do its best job to try to fill it information when I hit enter but we're gonna be very clear to see regular versus a smart object so let's go ahead and that little checkbox up there and see what Photoshop does okay so here we can see very clearly as we zoom in this information on the left is regular okay this is just a regular layer that we made small and made large again that's all that happened here now this layer is a smart object which we made incredibly small we made it large again and look we've lost absolutely no resolution in that photograph this is one of the huge reasons why Smart Objects are important so anytime you're doing any resizing of any layers or images it's a very good idea to use a smart object first that way you're not going to lose resolution all right well there we have it so we have our smart object now these layers we're gonna go turn these to smart objects too because I don't want to lose any resolution so let's right-click and convert that to a smart object okay we're gonna do the same thing here convert that one and let's go ahead and convert that to a smart object too so now we're gonna just kind of like make a little album display we're gonna go ahead and bring this image to the left here alright beautiful and now I want to basically each one of these documents to take some space on the right side of my image so here's what we're gonna do it's actually a pretty cool little workflow what we're gonna do is grab our rectangular marquee tool okay and I'm gonna make a selection right over here this is where my other images are going to occupy space so we're gonna make a selection right over here on the right hand side and then I'm gonna take each of these three there we go it will group all of them by hitting ctrl or command G and then I'm gonna click here on my layer mask perfect so it simply just adds a layer mask to the right hand side and because they're all in this group now I can move them around and they're only gonna show up there so what I need to do now is shrink these down a little bit so we're gonna hit ctrl or command T on our first one and go ahead and shrink it down make sure you hold shift to maintain your aspect ratio okay second one there we go we'll just shrink this one down a little bit fantastic and here's our third we'll go ahead and shrink down a little bit as well all right that's gonna get see how I shrank that down and maybe I'm like oh you know what that's too small let's go ahead and make it a little bit bigger again there we go just one example of a time when you don't want to lose resolution when you're making things larger and smaller now this looks great let's say for instance I want this to change a little bit though let's say I want to take this image here and make this my main image so I'm gonna go ahead and take this image we're just gonna bring it out right over top this other image here we've made it smaller but now all I have to do is hit ctrl or command T and make it larger again and this can now become my main image fantastic and let's take this other image and put it in there okay and I can hit ctrl or command T and make this a little bit smaller and then this can go right over here so as I'm doing this I'm making very you know very quick decisions as to like where everything is gonna go and I'm not losing any resolution as we go along now in this case I'm like ah you know what I think I liked it a little bit different the other way so let's go ahead and bring this back out there okay there we go this will be our main image just make this a little bit larger again this will go back up here and I'm gonna have this get a little bit smaller fantastic and go ahead and pull that right underneath there very cool now at this point I just want to create a couple like lines in my image just to kind of break everything up so super easy I'm gonna create a new line we're gonna use our marquee tool so M for the marquee tool okay just draw like a tiny little selection and hit shift delete we're gonna fill that with white there we go this is just on top of everything we're gonna hit ctrl or command J and then ctrl or command T so command J is gonna duplicate and then command T is transform there we go and I'm just gonna put those right up top over everything and now we have a nice little collage looks great so you can see that no matter how many times I make any of these images larger or smaller I haven't lost any resolution at all so that's our first main benefit of using smart objects now the next big benefit is when we apply a filter to our photo so let's go ahead and show you how that works we're gonna go back to our original image here this is our smart object and I'm gonna go ahead and right click on this we're gonna duplicate this layer so let's go ahead and duplicate that and then I'm gonna take this smart object status away we're gonna right click and I'm gonna go to rasterize layer' which is right here rasterize and then this shows just called normal so this is no longer a smart object so i have one layer that's a smart object and one layer that's normal let's just make everything else invisible so it's not distracting us so one smart object and one normal now let's go to our smart object and let's say I want to apply a little bit of sharpening so we're gonna go to filter down to sharpen and over to unsharp mask all right so you're looking at the image and you're like yeah this is looking awesome I am just gonna sharpen the heck out of this because I love sharpening oh my gosh it's so fun look at how sharp that is okay now let's do the same thing with our normal layer we're gonna go to filter down to sharpen and over to unsharp mask and we're gonna use all the same settings we're gonna say I'm so awesome at sharpening look how sharp that is and then we're gonna take a little bit of break go grab a little snack or a cup of coffee and come back and say oh my way over sharpen that that doesn't look good at all I want to tone that down well here on my normal layer good luck it's baked in there's nothing I can do basically I just have to start over because the sharpening is applied to this image now let's go ahead and take a look at our smart object the smart object on the other hand looks like the same deals going on but check this out because it's a smart object now I have what's called Smart Filters and any filter that you apply to a smart object becomes a smart filter so I can undo this at any time look at this I can just turn this unsharp mask off if I want turn it back on or I can just come to my senses and say you know what we just need to tone that sharpening way down there we go let's hit OK and now it actually looks good again I can turn it back off and on I can see my before and after and I could say oh you know what I did a really good job there that actually does look really nice where is my normal with out using a smart object whoo okay doesn't look great so not only does the smart object help you with your sizing but it will also help you with any filters now here's another cool thing I can actually apply that let's go ahead and turn these layers back on here I can actually apply that's sharpen to these other smart objects okay remember each of these three layers I made smart objects too so all I have to do is hold alt or option click on this little circle thing and OOP drag it up to these other layers look at this and then the same exact sharpening is getting applied you can see them they're the same exact sharpening is getting applied to these other layers and then look at this okay let's go ahead and zoom up here I can still turn this off and on at any time so it's the same exact sharpening that we applied to the other image and if I want to I can just double click here on the unsharp mask and I could change these settings a little bit so I'm like you know what a little bit more sharpen on that one looks pretty good alright so there we have it not only can you save a lot of information by turning these effects off and on but you can copy them from one image to another so using Smart Objects we now have a perfectly beautiful grid if I decide at any point in time you know what I want to take this image out and I just want to you know duplicate it and make it its own like full-screen image there we go I could just make that larger hit enter again you know basically like crop this back in ok and hit enter and there we go I haven't lost any resolution even though I've made the layer larger and smaller and applied a filter aren't Smart Objects cool I use them all the time I think they're gonna change your workflow and help you become less destructive in Photoshop thank you so much for watching if you're enjoying 30 days of Photoshop be sure to join it's absolutely free you get a calendar with all of 30 days you get off load images so you guys can follow along as well as bonus goodies you can do that right down below thank you so much I'll see you tomorrow hi everyone [Music]

Channel: PHLEARN

Views: 69,117

Keywords: Phlearn, Photography, Aaron Nace, Photoshop, Adobe, Tutorial, Help, Tips, How-to, Education, Adobe Photoshop, Class, Course, Learn Photoshop, smart objects, smart object, non-destructive editing, nondestructively, 30 days, day 13, photoshop tutorial, smart filters, photoshop cc, edit smart object in photoshop, how to edit smart objects in photoshop, open as smart object, embedded smart object, linked smart object, smart object photoshop, smart filter, free photoshop tutorial

Id: 44KFPa6WzWI

Length: 13min 37sec (817 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 14 2020