How to Work with Smart Objects in Photoshop

right welcome everyone hello and happy Monday it is that time of day got time a week and I'm very happy to be streaming to you live today on Photoshop and Smart Objects for those of you are new my name is Terry White worldwide design and photography evangelist for Adobe it's my pleasure to be streaming to you live today let me check one thing really quickly here cool it's great to be streaming to you live today and I'm talking about a topic that comes up quite often and that is how to work with Smart Objects in Photoshop so let me just make sure I got all my chat windows open so I don't miss any of your comments and I see some folks already chiming in over on YouTube and Facebook and see we get LinkedIn up here and get them all going so first and foremost I hope that wherever you are you guys are doing well and safe and staying busy and staying creative and not being overwhelmed by any of anything that's going on right now I know it's a lot I know sometimes it can feel very isolated too for especially for those that may be working from home that aren't used to working from or those that can't work from home and have to still go out and help the rest of the world survive so thank you all for all that you do alright I am not seeing it over there but that's okay okay so Pat and Mary Anna and Nicole and James Marsha and Richard and Sandi welcome I see Carol John Mary Colleen a yo-yo you told them saying it correctly Allen sin Colleen all the way from South or Cape Town South Africa she always joins us Wolfgang thanks for being here from Germany I hope that you're safe as well bail dear couldn't be a stream without you and John Stephens glad that you're here and you're looking forward to this all right Donovan can I get a while wild out of it you got a while alright so with that said let's dive into today's topic like I said it comes up often as a question I usually show it in conjunction with something else I'm working on but today we're going to take a look at how this all works together and how you can use smart objects pretty much for anything you do inside of Photoshop and sometimes you're getting smart objects whether you know you're getting them or not because a lot of times Smart Oven automatically and they can help you along your way all right so I see lots of folks coming in and still great thanks for all the hellos and all the different places that you guys are chiming in from but I'm gonna I could give shoutouts all day but maybe we'll do a stream on just shoutouts but today we're gonna go ahead and dive into the topic today and start taking a look at these smart objects we've made that a little too big let's go back down one more okay cool let's go ahead and switch over to the desktop that way you'll be able to see what I'm doing I've got Photoshop open in a corner I'm in the corner here but I've got Photoshop open and I don't have a document open because it kind of like to show things from scratch whenever I can so from scratch means we'll start where you're starting usually with nothing open and and how you can how you can get started so someone's asking is this recorded all live streams everywhere you are are usually record it the only reason it wouldn't be there after the fact is the presenter deleted it oh yes all my live streams are always recorded you'll always be able to come back and watch them after the fact so yeah yes to answer your question okay so now that I got Photoshop open and thanks for the compliment share and I appreciate that now I got Photoshop open and dad said the same thing about the shirt I'm switching colors that are around it so thanks let's go ahead and dive in and talk about what a smart object is how you'd make one what's the benefit and why you should be using them whenever you can so I think that's a enough of a heads up so let's start with something that we all kind of understand you understand for the most part resolution you understand that Photoshop is primarily pixel based and that when you something small and you make it really big it can become fuzzy it can become blurred it can become less sharp less detail because you're taking whatever number of pixels it had and you're spreading them out and you're letting Photoshop interpret to interpret new ones in between so we've all seen that happen you've all taken something that was really tiny tried to scale it up and it kind of fell apart well that's because of resolution but there's ways to work in that workflow where you're gonna make things small make things big and not lose resolution and not lose quality because you keep changing the size of things that's what another benefit of Smart Objects one of the biggest benefits of Smart Objects I think is that when people want to work as non-destructively as possible in other words you want to do things to a layer or to an object but you want to always be able to come back and change your mind so that's another reason why we work in layers and that's another reason why we work with smart objects so what's a smart up let's start with that all right I'm gonna open up a couple of images here together why since that one so better let me license this one if not I'll just open it as is okay we'll confirm that one great we got that one licensed that one will sink and we'll go ahead and open it up okay so I got this jungle scene that I just license from Adobe stock it doesn't have to be a dhobi stock open up whatever image you want then I'm gonna go ahead and pull in a different image totally different scene totally different situation the trees are no not the same or anything and I'll pull this in and just by bringing this in from a library the minute I click confirm or okay what's going to happen in my layers panel is I'm going to see that new layer I just pulled in and it's going to have that little cloud symbol on it anytime you see a little symbol like that in the lower right hand corner nine times out of 10 it means that it's a smart object so whenever you drag things in from a library they automatically come in as smart objects why is that they are going to come in linked to so that you can make changes to it and if you may change us to it it would update it everywhere you've used it that's the main reason it happens from the library but what that means is that that came in as a smart object automatically so just dragging it in now I'm gonna drag in one more but this time we're gonna hold down the option or Alt key on my keyboard so when I pull in that same exact lion or tiger that why I'm Tiger I put this in sa lion earlier when I pull in that same exact Tiger I'm gonna grab my move tool and let's pull it in again and this time of holding down the option key when I do it now when I hold down the option key I don't even get a confirm I don't get anything because when I held down the option key for the second Tiger notice it does not have that little icon in the right corner bottom right corner so that means that this tiger is not a smart object that means that this tiger doesn't have that special protection on it it's just a regular layer just like any other layer you create so what's the difference they look exactly the same they work exactly the same there's no difference between them because it's the same layer but one's a smart object and the other one is it so for example if I take the one that's not a smart object and I free transform command T and I scale it all the way down I make it really really tiny and then I commit to it I say yep I want it tiny just like that that little slow it's even behind me you can't see it let's move it over that little bitty tiger that's all the way in the bottom right hand corner now that's so small it's like a postage stamp but I've committed to it so that said take this resolution that you had squinch it all the way down and throw away the excess pixels we don't need them because we made it small don't need all that extra resolution so now if I were to command T again I change my mind I want it bigger command T and our ctrl T L windows and scale it back up and then commit to it that Tiger doesn't look at as sharp as that tiger anymore because we uh president now we took something that was that was great scaled it down threw away some data and then we changed our mind by scaling it back up and said Photoshop you figure out what it should look like in Photoshop did the best it's good but it threw away so much data that look at the eyes look at the tiger years look at the hair or fur coming out of the ear compared to the other ear you can easily see the difference between the two of the one I scaled up that wasn't a smart object scale down on the scale back up now let's say I do it again now it will probably won't get too noticeably worse Felicity command-t scale it down again commit to it and then oh nope I want it bigger again and scale it up again now I'm doing it twice I'm throwing away more data and I'm scaling it back up and I'm saying I hope that you can make this look better and and again you might not be able to tell much of a difference between the last two but it's progressively getting worse Photoshop does a good job of scaling things up but it's it can only do so much it can only put back so much data that you decided to throw away and it has to make up for it now so now I'm gonna I'm going to go to the other one I'm gonna move this one down I'm gonna go to the smart object one this time now I'm gonna do anything different scale it down again command T scale this one down make it really really really tiny go ahead and come into it I'm committed to it I've said yep make it really small and then scale back up command T I'm not gonna do undo that would be cheating I'm gonna actually scale it back up scale back up and look at that beautiful tiger because the entire time when I scale it down and scale it back up because it was a smart object Photoshop says oh you want to contain this stuff you don't want to throw anything away I'll let you scale it to your heart's content and I'm not going to delete any data so I can keep scaling it up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down all I want and it would always look as beautiful as the original now if I go way bigger than the original I'm gonna have the same problem it's gonna have to make up the data for what that should look like smart out of Saturday let me do that but it's going to take something that I had I can scale it and play with it move it around all day long and it will never destroy the original that's why we like smart objects all right so let's let's do another example I'm gonna turn off the Tigers for now we'll just go back to the jungle and let's say that I want to bring a logo in now logos we tend to do those as vectors so same thing when I bring in this this Adobe stock smart home solar home logo that I created was got some text on it and everything pull that in now that is tiny that's already small that was the size it was created but because it's vector I can scale up and it will ring retain the quality and if I click OK to commit to it we can see that that came in as a smart object same thing let's grab the solar logo again I think that's the one I pulled in near the bottom I'm gonna hold down the option key this time and pull it in again now I'll put it up at the top this time and if I commit to it and it doesn't have the Smart Objects that I did it right all right oh no I didn't do it right all right so let's let me make sure I'm doing the right one delete that one for a second pull it in one more time if not I know how to force the issue so I'll hold on the option key and maybe it just won't do it cuz it's vector that could be the case - yes no it's not doing comes back well it's okay it didn't keep the link but it's kept it it says I'm gonna still protect you I think this is a smart object whether you want these to or not so I'm going to go around it I'm gonna say no no no I really don't want you to be a smart out anymore I'm gonna go to my lair menu come I could do a right click on a layer as well but I'm gonna go to layer menu come down to smart objects and say restaurants in other words don't make it smart don't make don't keep it vector don't do all things that would make it cool so now we've got the logo on the bottom and again we brought it in small but we can go ahead and scale it up no big no problem and looks great so now turn that one off for a second and we'll go to the one that I told it not to be smart not to be vector anymore we scale that one up and we start to see it fall apart already it's not bad it's not awful but it's nowhere near as sharp is that one so it's a little bit of blurred on the edges and it's okay in most case you'll get away with it but why not keep it smart why not keep it infinitely scalable and with a vector object smart object you can go way bigger than the original and keep all the quality and it will look sharp no matter what size you make it and you can keep scaling and keep making it up and down all you want okay so that's the difference between working with a vector smart object and also showed you how to turn off the smart object now what's another reason we would use a smart object well let's say you want to work with text let's say we want to we want to put some text in here when I say jungle all right we'll make our text bigger great so now we got our jungle text in there and let's say I want to blur that text a little bit well typically with a text layer you don't get to run filters on it you don't get to say that you want to run a filter on it so when I go to run a filter on it Photoshop will let me but it's going to tell me it's going to have to do one of two things first if I go to my filter menu and I say I want to run a Gaussian blur on this text layer it lets me do it but watch what it comes up with before it lets me actually do it hello well well hello can't run filters on text layers so you got a choice rasterize it like we saw what happens to the logo which we don't want to do if we can avoid it or the smart choice which is the default convert to smart object so if I say yeah I'm gonna do that bad thing convert to smart object then I can run blur filters all I want I can turn it down I can make it more blurry I'm getting a nice preview I don't want to make it so blurry I can't read it let's make it nice and out-of-focus now we click OK and it does this really really cool thing on the layers panel it says I am going to not only convert it to a smart filter layer and I'm gonna show you the filter you ran on it but you can turn that off so if you want to see it without the filter at any given time no filter turn it back on filter you want to change the amount of blur normally when you run a filter on a layer that's it once you click OK you've done it but if you run a filter on a smart object layer or a smart filter layer you can always come back double click and say no no make it a little more blurry or no no make it less blurry you can do you can keep coming back to it and keep making changes because here's what you're really doing and this is what a smart object is a smart object and for those of you in the United States you will understand this term I'm not sure if it's sold worldwide it's like Tupperware think of the plastic food containers for those of you don't know what Tupperware is in different countries the plastic food containers that have that lid on it you can take your lunch to back when you used to go to work take your lunch to work in that Tupperware and that plastic container with a nice resealable lid on it and the reason you put it in that plastic container this whole nothing wouldn't happen to it like if nothing would spill out of it and nothing would spill into it nothing would touch it so when you say convert a layer to a smart object or convert multiple layers or smart object you saying make this layer into Tupperware so I can do stuff on the outside of it I can write my name on piece of Tupperware it does not affect the food on the inside so and I could use a use a eraser and erase my name off of it it does not affect so that's what we're doing we took the word jungle we put it in a piece of Tupperware called a smart object and now we're blurring the outer container we're blurring the smart object and it's letting me see through that's the difference all right so Pat saying this is the most clear of any that I've seen thank you yeah because smart objects everyone says use it do it do it blah blah they don't really explain the concept and that's the concept is that you're putting whatever it is and it can be one layer could be ten layers but you're putting it all in a container you can do whatever you want to the outside of the container and it does not permanently affect the contents so what does that mean we already saw that we turned it off turned on we can delete it we can get rid of it what if I need to change the word what if I want to change the word to say tiger well I can't grab my text tool my type tool and click on I'm already on the type so I can't click on that anymore and change out if I click it's going to add a new text layer because even though that's still text it's now in a smart object that you would need to go in to to change how do I go into it double click on it let me double click on it Oh now back to my editable text I'm going this and I can say that this should say Tiger now it shouldn't say jungle anymore now notice it also when you double click on a smart object it opens whatever's inside that Tupperware whatever's inside that smart object into a new document into another document so I'm editing just the text in its own document its own Photoshop big document and that's regardless of the original document that it came from so I got two images open right now two documents so once I'm done once I've named that once I've said change it from jungle to tiger click OK then I closed Tiger lair the tiger on the maps I shouldn't say lair the tiger document it's gonna ask me do I want to save it just like closing any other document yes I do and now I have made a change that I can always go back and change and now tiger put back in the Tupperware the Tupperware has blur on it now tiger is blurred that's the difference okay alright so see what the Senators as since we should be using smart objects on every layer we create what's the negative memory okay so Robert the answer really is no you wouldn't use a smart object and everything cuz you don't need oh I don't need a smart object if it just wanted to say Tiger but I'm not gonna add any effects to it or do anything to it I don't need to make that a smart object so that's why every layer isn't a smart object layer by default anyway the answer to your question though should I be using smart objects when I am gonna do stuff to a layer yes what's the negative impact makes the file bigger so that's it it could potentially make the file bigger because remember when we use the example of taking the logo and making it really small when it's not a smart I'll just throwing that data way therefore making your document smaller when it's not throwing the data way that big logo is still the big logo even though you made it small so it's still taking up the same amount of resources in other words all right Shawanna saying so easy to understand well thank you thank you thank you all right now nice and hmm food thanks sir all right all right so now let's say you like we cheated we made smart objects automatically we draw the layer over or a credit library item of it made a smart object we went to blur text made a smart object what do you want to make one on your own what if you don't want to to be reliant on Photoshop making it for you so let's turn off let's actually list through all these layers away let's throw away all of these I'm gonna start from scratch when I start from where you would start you start with an image okay so I have an image open and then you might you might do a composite you might say hey I'm gonna open up this Tiger layer and I'm gonna composite it on to the other one so I'm just going to drag it over so I'm not I'm pretending I didn't have it in a library so when I pull it over it comes over as a regular like layer hey now I want to say the word tiger so I would click Tiger say the word tiger make it whatever font color what a blah blah blah put it wherever I want and so now I got an X and I got a nice text layer and let's say I saw a flag there earlier we don't want to use the squirrels squirrels bat those who watch that stream will understand a lot all right here's a British flag UK flag I should say alright let's go ahead pull the flag in now that flag oh let's just do it the right way let's escape let's get out of this let's pull it over so it's not a smart out to Coakley look cool and I think that will still be a smart object but we can rasterize it yep I thought so let's right-click and let's just simply rasterize it later okay so now let's say you had three layers that you didn't get from libraries they're not smart objects right now and of course you can apply a blending mode to this layer to maybe blend it in better than what we're seeing here so we'd be able to see it better against that background maybe a nice overlay like any of these on that dark background it's not important all right we'll leave it white we'll just take it out the old-fashioned way all right let's go ahead and say that we want to mmm he's probably just thinking of the million ways I can do it these properties let's just say let's try to remove background I gotta do background we'll do it that way okay so now that I got my flag in place and we've got we've got our three layers people have got a layer with a layer mask now I say hey I might want to do something to all three of these and by the way while we're at it no sense in doing this let's go to our properties one more time let's try to remove background tiger not bad not perfect but not bad okay so now we have the three layers because I couldn't live with it being in the background we have our three layers we can move them around and do all the stuff we would normally do you can even group them together as a layer group you can put them in a folder blah blah blah however if we convert them all to a smart object then we can do all the things we just talked about so if I select all three and I go to do it from either place but let's say I go to my layer menu I go to smart objects and I say convert to smart object so there's a layer command for its in you can right click on the layers and do a lot of ways convert to smart objects notice what it did it looks like it hey you got rid of all my layers no I didn't I just took all three layers and put them in one thing called Tiger which is the smart object layer so now if I were to do a blur I can apply a blur with steel Gaussian blur like we did before and oh no I don't want to get rid of it so much but I did kind of like big blurry okay so here's what I like I like the blurry text and maybe the blurry flag but I don't like the blurry Tiger well how would I how would I get rid of that well keep in mind that when it created that smart filter layer it also made a mask so if I were to grab my paintbrush and I were to go to my brushes and not use the crazy brush I use last time it's used soft and round then I can paint that off of this part of the of the tiger to bring that back in and again all I'm doing is I've applied a blur but I'm saying I applied it to the smart object and I'm also saying don't apply it to these parts of that layer so I'm going in and just brushing it away on the mask that I got automatically when I applied the filter so can I do more sure can I go in and apply another filter absolutely filter menu camera raw filter because maybe in the camera raw filter and notice what Camera Raw filter does it brings back up the original unfortunately it's not going to show it to me in context by default like this but let's say that I just want to will make a crazy vibrant will make the tiger really really orange unrealistically orange just to show a difference and will make it brighter click OK and it does those things but notice it didn't do it to the face because I had already masked the face for that layer so if I were to say I want it blurry and mass then I could paint white back in those spaces and I'll get the orange blurry tiger but I am getting the orange blurry body unchanged oh you want to change the word for a tiger or something else how do I get back to the text double click on a smart object then you go back to the text and edit the text all you want so now you wanted to say jungle again it says jungle again click OK close it save it it does the update and keeps all the other things that you applied to your Tupperware so you apply to blur you applied crazy Camera Raw filter all of which you can turn off and turn on so if I don't like the blur but I like the Camera Raw filter I can turn the blur off keep the Camera Raw filter even though I did it after the fact so that's another thing that it lets me do typically filters are are acute or they are cumulative so when you apply a filter it tends to it like you apply the filter you blurred it and you apply some other color to it well now you can't get back to the bar this way you can because you're not really applying you're not really stacking the effect on top of each other other than visually so that's what Smart Objects is all about and that's the way we work with Smart Objects do I use them all the time yes don't use them for every single layer no because every single layer doesn't need it the jungle layer didn't need it anything to it yet so but if I were going to I would always look to see am I gonna use a smart object to make it whatever it is I'm gonna work on less destructive that way all right so hopefully you guys got something out of that hopefully you will now go work with smart objects without fear you'll be able to go in in case you make a smart object for something that you case you make a smart object for some object and you want to extract the contents you can go backwards you can say smart object back to layers so that's a command you can do it that way you can also double-click the smart object and drag the content to another document if you wanted to so you do it that way so lots of ways to go backwards and also you could just rasterize the smart object to become a regular layer again but I don't recommend that it's just easier to say Photoshop convert this back to layers again after the path but keep in mind you're also going to lose whatever you did to it the smart object because the smart object is the container you're taking you're saying dump the food onto a plate throw away the Tupperware where the Tupperware is what had the blur so you just have to remember that what you're doing is what you're doing alright Jamie is asking when when do you send a photo with from Lightroom as a smart object I don't usually use that workflow so Jamie's asking there's a workflow for Lightroom that you can edit in Photoshop like you normally do you can edit in Photoshop as a smart object so it just basically brings your photo over from Lightroom has a smart object ready to go I not found a reason why I would do that I know I'm not doing that in other words I don't have a workflow that I use that for because what you're saying is bring this photo over but don't let me give up the pixels unless I really want to dig into the pixels which is usually what I want to do so I guess I would do it if I only want to apply a filter like we just did I wanted to apply some filter to it that Lightroom doesn't have and like a sharpening met maybe if I wanted to apply sharpening filters to it or something else to it that Lightroom doesn't have but then I would keep the non-destructive workflow that way I don't I don't do it but yeah that would be one of the reasons why you might do it all right where can I get the Creative Cloud background imagery for my zoom videos it is proprietary that meaning someone made that and normally that person's name is on there somewhere but yeah someone named that made that so we can't just freely give it away because that's giving away someone's art normally like I said I have their name their Behance next to it but it might be buried behind something it has a nice background that's why I use it but we licensed it so that's got to pay the artist if you want to use their stuff all right cheers everybody thanks for watching and we will catch you on the next one yeah bye everybody have a good day so get rest of your day everybody [Music] [Music]

Channel: Terry White

Views: 5,229

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Id: sS3g3_GEP8E

Length: 32min 18sec (1938 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020