Have you ever wanted more quality
and flexibility while working? What you need is
Smart Objects inside of Photoshop. And what I'm going to do today is
I'm going to use potatoes to explain to you how Smart Objects work. Then I'm going to give you
seven tips with Smart Objects. So if you want to work faster with
higher quality and more flexibility, keep watching. Hey, CAFE crew. It's Colin Smith
here from photoshopCAFE.com, the very best place to
learn Photoshop and Lightroom. Also, don't forget to follow me
on Instagram at Photoshop CAFE. I've got a ton of images that
I'm posting there all the time. So, what I'm going to do today is
I'm going to show you Smart Objects because I've had a lot of people
say they like Smart Objects or they want to like Smart Objects. They're not aware of all the things they
can do or necessarily how they work. So, I'm going to explain them really
simply right now using a potato. So, imagine this little potato here
is your image that you're working on. It's a layer, whatever it could be, it could be cut out or it
could be a flattened layer. Now, the thing is, if I
want to paint this blue and I paint this blue, this
potato is now going to be blue. And it's going to be very hard for me
to get rid of that effect or if I want to apply a rubber
texture or something to it, it's going to be very difficult, in fact, almost impossible
to get that off there. However, if I take a bag and
I put the potato inside the bag, now, I can put all kinds of
textures, whatever I want. I can paint this bag and you know, of course, I can make it nice and small,
same shape as a potato, whatever and then, this is going to look blue. It's going to give that blue appearance
or whatever I want to do to it. But it's not going to
affect the potato itself. It's just going to apply
whatever I put on it. Now, here's the thing. This is your pixel. This is your Smart Object. So, here's the thing
about the Smart Object. I can also put more
than one potato in there. So, I can put more
than one layer in there and I can make these
adjustments and at any time. If I want to change my mind,
I can open up this bag which would be a Smart Object.
I could pull my potato out. So, here's the other thing. I could have two of these. So, maybe I have two Smart Objects. I have another potato here. And I can put them both together
and put these inside another bag. So, essentially what I've done is I've nested two Smart Objects
inside another Smart Object. Now, if those bags are painted blue,
they would still be blue but if I painted this one red, now
it's going to have red over the top. And if I ever want to go back,
I can always go back inside that bag. I can pull those bags out. I can pull the potatoes out. So, that's essentially
how Smart Objects work. Now, these images I'm using for
these examples are from Adobe Stock. I encourage you to download
images from Adobe Stock because you can search for them
and download them directly with the inside of Photoshop. If you want to play around, an experiment, you can download a watermarked
version and at any time, you can choose to license that image
and use it in your commercial projects. So, before we jump into
Photoshop really quick, I have a question for you. What is your main use of Photoshop? You use it for design photography? Let me know. Drop it in the comment underneath. I'm really curious to see how
you guys are using Photoshop. So, here we are right now and we've got this butterfly and what I'm going to do first of all, the very first thing I'm going to
show you about Smart Objects is how they maintain quality. So, I'm going to duplicate this
by holding the Alt/Option key, and I'm going to drag out
a copy of the butterfly. Notice, we have two of
them on separate layers. This top one, I'm going to right-click,
choose to convert to a Smart Object. You know it's a Smart Object because
the icon appears in the corner. So, essentially what we've done
right now, this is our butterfly. We've dropped it inside the bag
and we have now got a Smart Object. So, if it's in the bag, that means
I can't directly edit this picture. So, let me say I grab something
hideous like the eraser tool and I try to erase it, notice I can't. Now, if I double click the Smart Object, notice what it does is it opens inside a
new document and here is a butterfly. If I wanted to erase it now, I could. So, we can make any changes to it
and if we save it there, then we go back into the document and we're back inside our Smart
Object or a plastic bag. OK, that's the basics. OK, let me show you something here. If I select both of these
layers and I scale them down. "Ctrl+ T" or "Cmd + T" on Mac
for Free Transform. And I'm going to drop these way down. Let's make them real small here. Hit Enter. Excellent! Now, why don't we scale them back up? "Ctrl/Cmd + T", and they look
blurry but we apply it and boom. Look what happens here. You can see the one that was inside the
Smart Object has maintained its quality. It hasn't lost anything. Meanwhile, this other one is
deteriorated a little bit. In fact, if we zoom in at 100%,
look at the difference in quality. That's the one without the Smart Object and that's the one with the Smart Object. And of course, the more you transform
the image, the more it loses quality. Maybe, you weren't even aware of that fact when you're scaling things up and down, you're deteriorating. Here's the thing, if I do it a couple
more times, it's going to get worse. I'll show you. Make it real small, "Ctrl + T".
Make it bigger. Let's make it real huge. "Ctrl + T", bring it down again. And look at that. See how the one that's not in the
Smart Object is really losing its quality. Smart Object one, not concerned at all. Let's have a look at the second
benefit of working with a Smart Object. We can apply Filters and when we apply Filters,
they become Smart Filters. So, if we choose Filter,
and I'm going to choose liquify, it's going to apply the
liquify just like normal and what I'm going to do,why don't we
just give this spiky wings for now? It'll be just kind of fun. New species of Monarch butterfly. I'm sure there's probably a butterfly
like this that exist somewhere. Alright, and then we're going to click OK. And now what we've done is we've
created this new species of butterfly. It's called the spiky Monarch. Now, the cool thing about working with
the Smart Filter versus a regular Filter is we see under here it says Smart Filter. We can turn that off at any time and
it hides the effect of that smart Filter. And if we decide to remove our liquifier,
we just simply right-click here and we delete the smart Filter
and that takes it away. You can make copies of these and
transform them without losing any quality. So, let's have a look right now. I'm just going to hit "Ctrl/Cmd + T"
We're going to drop down the size of this and why don't we drag it over here? So, what I want to do now is I
want to make a bunch of butterflies. So, the way to do that is
to hold down the alt or the option key and we're going to drag them out. So, I'm just going to hit
"Ctrl + T", right-click. Let's do a Free Transform and
we can have one over there. Alright, so now we've made lots
of copies of these Smart Objects. Now, here's the cool
thing about Smart Objects. All of these are linked. So, if I change one, it's
going to change them all. Let me demonstrate. Let's grab this one here. I'm going to "Ctrl + click" or
"Cmd + click" to select it. Double-click it. Notice we go inside the bag. Now, we're inside this bag and
we're going to make some changes. We're inside the Smart Object. Why don't we some Hue and
Saturation Adjustments? So, let's apply a Hue and
Saturation Adjustment Layer. And by the way, adjustment layers are a
great way to work inside a Smart Objects because it keeps everything non-destructive. And if you don't fully
understand adjustment layers, I've got a fantastic tutorial in the comments. I'm going to give you a link
underneath to that tutorial. Alright, so why don't we change the color? Just so we can see how this works. We'll do something like, I don't know, let's drag it over and
make it yellowish color. Notice, it's orange there. And then I apply this,
it makes it yellow. If we go back here,
notice they are all orange. Now, if I save this, and I
close it. We go back. Notice they've all updated and
all of them now are yellow. So, that's another great
thing about Smart Objects is you change one, you change them all but what if you don't
want to change them all? But there's a way where you
can create a Smart Object that works independently
than the rest and I'll show you how to do that. So, what we're going to
do is, under here, to create a new Smart Object, we're going to right-click on this and now, we're going to choose
to new Smart Object via Copy. Let's pull this out a little
bit so we can see the numbers and we can see number 12. That's our newest one and we want
to make sure we pull that out. OK, let's go in and
adjust this Smart Object. Double-click, go in here and what we'll do is something
radical like we'll invert it. So, I'm selecting that
layer hitting "Ctrl/Cmd + I", hit save and now we go back and
notice that only that Smart Object has changed. It hasn't affected the rest and
that's because we did it via copy. Let me delete that. And now, I'm going to show you another thing. What if we want to do
some adjustments on these? Even though we can adjust these independently, the other thing we can do is we
can select all of these butterflies and we can right-click and we
can convert to a Smart Object. We'll call it butterflies. So, essentially, what we've done now
is we've nested all of these
Smart Objects into one object and notice we can move it around and of course, if we want to duplicate it, we could do that to get more
butterflies very, very quickly. And now, if we wanted,
we could select both of these and hit convert to Smart Object again
and then we've nested them once again. So, what we've done is
we've taken this bag and we've put it inside this bag and then we've put these
bags inside this bag. So, that's the equivalent
of what we're doing. So, now, anything we do here is going to affect all of
those butterflies together. However, we can still get
to those individual ones. Alright, so let's have a look
at making an adjustment here. So, if we just go under the Filter
and we get a Camera Raw Filter, and maybe, we want to do
something here with the colors. Maybe, we want to just bring
down the contrast a little bit. Maybe, make them a little bit brighter. We're also going to reduce the blacks. Make them a little softer there and little touch of negative clarity and then we're just going to click "OK". So now, we've adjusted all these butterflies. But if we want to get into the
individual ones, we can double click. Notice there's the two sets of butterflies
and if we want to get into the individual ones, it doesn't matter which one
of these we click on because remember we duplicated
it so exactly the same. So, we double-click here
on the Smart Object and now we're in here and there's
our individual butterflies. So, if we double-click on this one,
remember we made the adjustments. If I turn the off and
hit save We go there. Look at that. We want to set save on that one. Save that one. And then we go back and all our
butterflies are orange again. So you can see how incredibly
flexible these Smart Objects are. Now there's more things
you can do with Smart Objects. You can also use them with type layers. You can drop an Illustrator files
in there and those vector files you can actually double click
and we'll go into Illustrator. You can edit. There's a ton of different things that
you can do with these Smart Objects. But let's do one more thing. Let's go back in and now that
we've got these documents open, we can just click here and go to
our individual butterfly if we like. Why don't we select it? We're going to go under Filter
and let's go back under liquify. And I feel like I want to
get these spikes back again. Then we click "OK". Let's save that. Close it up. Notice those are all spiky. Let's save that. Notice all of these are spiky
because that's double of those. Remember it's applied all the way. We save that. Then we go back to our top and
notice now they're all spiky. So you can see how incredibly time
saving these Smart Objects can be as well as preserving your quality, giving you
flexibility and nothing is affected permanently. We can go back and we can change
anything we want at any time. So bear in mind with this
particular composition. What I'm trying to do is explain to
you exactly how Smart Objects work. So, I hope you've learned something. If you have, drop a comment. Let me know what you've learned that's new. So, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to give you links underneath where you can grab these images from Adobe Stock and follow along with the
same images that I'm using and also, you know, don't forget
you can grab all kinds of images from Adobe Stock and play
around and experiment them and I'm also going to give you a
link underneath where you can get ten free images and also I'm going to give you another link where you can become a contributor, anyone can become a contributor. It's actually very easy, just
follow the link underneath, sign up and then you can get your photos
in front of millions of people and make some extra revenue. So anyway, if you like this tutorial,
smash that like button into dust and if you enjoy this kind of tutorials,
hit that subscribe button right now and that little notification bell. I do a new tutorial every single Tuesday and occasionally I'll also add one on a Saturday. So, thanks, guys, for watching. Until next time, I'll see you at the CAFE.
