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Using Smart Objects in Adobe Photoshop

Now let's get into a feature in Photoshop that is known as smart objects. Smart objects is it's hard to describe because if you're not used to using smart objects, once you do start using them and you start to understand what they're really capable of, it really takes Photoshop to a whole another level where the number of things you can do in it. And the versatility how flexible it becomes is something you can't even imagine if you don't know what a smart object is. So let's learn about smart objects and how they can make you literally work smarter, a smart object is something that can take a little while to get your head around. But once you do, you can completely change the way you think about working in Photoshop. In this image. I've constructed a logo for a book that I've written many years ago and in it over here in the layers panel, this logo is made out of multiple layers. So up here, I have just the color for the word two. Then I have the text below that I have a blur below tha...

t I have part of that little fire which is made out of two different layers. And if I turn these back on one at a time that builds up this logo that was used on the cover of the book. Anyway, what I'd like to do is be able to warp this, which means bend it a bit so that maybe it doesn't look like it's going in a straight line, instead it's slightly curved. And if I were to click on any one of these layers, I could usually come up here to the edit menu, choose transform and there, I would find the choice called warp. And in choosing that I could do something like this, whatever I'd like or I could instead come up here to the top and choose what type of warp I'd like and then just have it warped. Well, I need to do that out of multiple layers because this whole logo needs to be warped. So I could attempt to select all the layers that make up that logo. But when I do, if you ever have more than one layer selected, when you go to the edit menu and you choose transform, you can scale and rotate, but you'll notice that warp is grayed out because it only works when a single layer is active. So I need to do something to somehow get all of these to warp together. And I don't want to warp each one separately. In fact, that wouldn't quite work because certain elements are smaller than other elements. And that little rectangle that it puts around, it would be a different size for like the flame compared to the text. And I wouldn't be able to get consistent warping. So I need to do something. Well, what I could do is of course, go to my layer menu and choose merge layers and then it would combine together all those layers and then I could be able to do what I want, which is to warp. And maybe I come up here and do that arc and I just bring the amount of bending down to a little less than what we get as the default. And that's exactly what I want. But doing that makes it so I no longer have the versatility of being able to change the shape of this flame easily or the multicolor effect or all sorts of things. What if I want to rename the book to some other text and still keep all this kind of effect going on? So let's choose undo and let's figure out how to do this where we still maintain all these individual layers and we can still do things like warping. So what I'm gonna do is select all those layers and I'll go to the layer menu. I'm gonna choose smart objects and I'm gonna say convert to smart object. Now, when I do watch the layers panel and you're gonna see that all those layers are gonna look as if they've been merged into one and now I don't need this little folder here that was containing them. So let me get it out of there and throw that away just to simplify what we got. And if you look at that layer though, it looks different than before when I merged those layers because it has this little icon in the lower right corner. Well, that icon indicates it's a special layer and it's known as a smart object. So a smart object is like a container that can hold as many layers as you want. But in the layers panel, it shows up as a single layer, then you're able to open that container and see the layers that are contained within it and make changes. But before I show you how that's done, let's warp this just because we gotta make sure that it works now that it's a single layer warp works and we'll come up here and maybe I'll make it. So it does this little wave flaggy thing and I'll just turn down the amount up here in the options bar. So it'll get a little hint of it. Let's say that's what I wanted. I'll press return or enter to indicate I'm done. All right. Now, what I'd like to do is go in there and modify this. Maybe I don't like the little motion blur like effect that's behind the text anymore. Well, in the layers panel, you see that little thumbnail that has that special icon on it. I'm gonna double click anywhere within that little thumbnail. And when I do all those layers that I had selected at the time I created a smart object that are gonna appear as a separate document. So here goes, this is the inside of that smart object. This is its contents and I'm gonna come in here and just turn off one of these layers. Here's the one that has that blur and I might as well make another one, maybe I'll make it. So the flame changes in appearance and then all I'm gonna do is close this. And when I close it, it's gonna ask if I wanna save those changes. But you're used to seeing this come up, especially when it mentions a file extension and file name. You're used to that meaning that you're saving something on your hard drive as a file. And we're not here when you're working with a smart object, this is getting saved back into wherever it came from. And where did it come from? When did this document appear when I double clicked on that layer? So this is saving it back into the layer of the original document. So I'll choose save. And now you can see here that it no longer has that little motion blur behind it. And this flame used to have some yellow in it and now it no longer does if you want to see the difference. I'll simply choose undo with command Z. That's what it used to look like. And then I'll do shift command Z which means reapply. And you can see how we've modified it and I can come in here and double click on that layer as many times as I want and make additional changes. So maybe I turn that uh yellow stuff back on and I decided the word two should not be colored. Well, I think I have a layer that's coloring it. So I'll just turn that off. Now, you don't have to close this document in order to see the other one update. And what I can do is instead just go to the file menu and choose save and that's not saving it on the hard drive, it's saving it back into that layer. And I'm just gonna switch to this other tab which has that uh document in it. And now you can see we have the yellow that's in the flame. And if I were to choose undo you'd see before that, you also see that I changed the text. So a smart object is a container that can hold multiple layers, but it appears as a single layer here in the layers panel. And it fools all sorts of Photoshop features into thinking that that all those layers were merged together into one. Another example is uh if I were to, let's just go over here and select multiple layers and I wanted to apply a filter. Well, filters can only work on a single layer at a time. And so you notice that they're all grayed out when I have multiple layers active. But there's one choice here. What does it say convert for smart filters? This is identical to go to the layer menu coming down here to smart objects and choosing that it's just putting it over here because it's convenient. In fact, this is more convenient than having to search over here in the busy looking layers menu to find this and go to a sub menu. So oftentimes I go to the filter menu and choose this to convert something to a smart object. Well, I don't need to do it here because these elements are already used over in this document. And right there, it's showing up as a single layer. But now if I go here to the filter menu and I choose blur, I could do something like a motion blur and it can actually apply. Usually you can't apply filters to text for instance. Well, if I had text within a smart object, then you can and then you can always edit the smart object and maybe change a typo in your text, that kind of thing. So the way I think of this is this is working much like many other programs do that are not designed for working with pictures. Imagine a word processor in a word processor, you place your logo as part of the document. Well, the word processor only knows that there is an image sitting there and it can't look into the file that contains that image to see. Is it made out of layers? Is it anything else? All it knows is here is where that image is going to be rendered. And if you were to update the file of the logo using illustrator or Photoshop or something else, then it might update that file. But it has no idea what it's made out of. Well, when you convert something to a smart object Photoshop has no idea what's inside that smart object unless you double click on it and then it will appear as a separate document. I'll close that separate document and I think I made changes, I made that show up again and the yellow show up again. So if I made changes, it'll ask if I want to save it and then over here it will update. And even if I had a motion blur applied to it, the motion blurred version would update to reflect that new contents. But unfortunately, I turned off the motion blur. So you don't notice that. So anyway, that's one of the concepts of using a smart object. Let's look at some others here. I have text and what I wanna do to the text is I wanna make it be in perspective and to do it in perspective. Usually I go up here to the edit menu I would choose transform. And there's a choice in here called distort. And there's another one called perspective. But neither one of those work when you have text, text is a special kind of layer and there's only so much you can do with it. But if I go to the layer menu and with that text layer active, I tell it to convert it to a smart object. Well, now Photoshop has no idea what that layer is made out of. If it was made out of text, if it was made out of nine layers or if it's something else. So now if I go up here to edit and choose transform, I no longer find the limitation so I can come in here and choose distort or perspective. I'm gonna try using distort. What it allows me to do is grab these little corners and pull each one separately. Well, I'm gonna put the top of the letters right behind this little trolley that's here and I'm gonna put the lower left right there as well. I'll put it right on that little track, it was going down and then I'm going to take the upper here and I'm just gonna kind of follow. Do you see the angle of the building behind? I'm gonna kind of go with that angle so that this is parallel with it, maybe about two out there and then I'll grab the bottom corner and get it on the train track that's there and just get the, the vertical to be vertical, you know, straight uh and I'll press return or enter. So now I was able to get what I envisioned, which is to get this to be at an interesting angle like that. Let's try another version. Here, I have two versions of the same thing. What I started out with is I drew a shape, the shape can be drawn with this tool, just a shape tool and I just drew like this. There you go a shape. Then I decided to style that shape by going to the bottom of my layers panel, clicking on the letters FX. And one of the choices in here is called a pattern overlay. Then if you do that, there are many different patterns you can choose from. Like here's this one that there's all sorts of patterns and you can load more of these, you can make your own. There's all sorts of things you can do, but I click on. OK. Now let's say I want to make a change to that layer. So I do something like go up here to the edit menu. I choose transform, it says path because when you have a shape layer, which is what I'm working on, it thinks that its shape is defined by a path. So ignore the word path. Just know I'm trying to do this. Now, I'm gonna attempt to rotate uh or scale. Let's do any of these. Uh I'll go over here and rotate when I do notice that the pattern inside is not rotating along with this shape. Or if I were to come up there and instead choose that I'd like to warp this, it will allow me to warp it. But what it's doing is it's going to warp the shape itself and then afterwards it's going to apply that pattern. If I can grab these right NL press trend or enter to indicate that I'm done, it mentions that it has to change what kind of setup that shape is with, but that's OK. And just notice that I can't get it to warp what the pattern that has been applied. And the reason for that is if you were to look in my layers panel, ignore all the other layers and just look at this one because that's when I drew uh when I ended up adding that effect, it's sitting right here as pattern overlay, but it's just uh accessory kind of attached to that layer and I can change the layer. However, I want the size of it, the shape of it, anything else? And this just remains a setting attached to it so that any change I make to the shape, this just updates to um reflect it. Well, let me throw that away because I already have a version that's a little fancier here and here is the not smart version and let's just double check that it still works that way. So if I come in here and attempt to warp this and maybe I choose one of these fancy warps that the pattern that is contained within it that is applied to it is not updating at all. Then imagine instead that I took that layer and I converted it into a smart object. Remember that can be done under the layer menu or under the filter menu right here. This has nothing to do with filters specifically. It's just that smart objects are often used before applying a filter. So they put it here to make it easier to find. I just chose that in the very first time you use it. This comes up to tell you OK, suddenly your filters will be re editable. I'll show you what that means in a few minutes, but let's say don't show again and we click. OK? All right. Now that that was a smart object, we can work on it differently in that if I come up here and warp it that pattern that's applied to it. If you look in the layers panel, I no longer see it there. And therefore it's inside that smart object and Photoshop has no idea that it's a pattern being applied. It has no idea how that is created in general. So now if I choose warp, I could come up here and do any kind of warping I want and it does it to the entirety of that contents because the pattern itself is hidden inside that smart object and Photoshop can't look in there to notice it's there and therefore it acts differently. There's something else about it. Let me choose undo. And there is a way when you have a smart object to force it to turn it into a normal layer where it's kind of like merging layers together where you no longer have the individual pieces. And one way of doing that is to come up here to the layer menu and choose smart objects. And then there's a choice in here called raster eye raster. I just means merge together whatever is in that smart object. So you can't get to the individual pieces anymore. And so that this is just a normal layer made out of one piece. So watching my layers panel, when I choose raster eye on that middle layer, and you notice the smart object icon disappears and now it is truly made out of one piece. So now let's look at the difference between that and the one above which is still a smart object. Well, let's say I come up here and I decide I want to transform it and I'm gonna rotate this and I rotated, I don't know something like that, press return or enter. Then what if later on maybe two days later I decide I want to rotate it again. Maybe I want to get it back to its original angle. Well, if I go up to the edit menu, choose transform and choose rotate, look at what happens. It doesn't remember that it was ever rotated before. And so it puts a normal rectangular bounding box on it, but it doesn't match up with the angle that was there. And so now I'd have to kind of eyeball trying to get that straight and I doubt I'm ever gonna get it perfectly straight. And even if I do the quality of the result is not gonna look as good because it transformed the information more than once. Um You'll see what I mean when I talk about scaling. In fact, let's scale this. I'll go over here and let's scale it to make it really tiny. I'm gonna make it that small. Well, if you zoom up, now, if you look at it, there's hardly any information in there. And if I then scale it back up and I just say, let's make it big again. Well, the only thing it has to go on is what you saw a few seconds ago. It doesn't remember what the original looked like. So when I apply it, it looks terrible. Well, now let's try the same thing with a smart object and see how it's different if I come in here and transform. And I say I wanna rotate. Well, I can rotate. But if I go back, that rotation is just like a setting applied to the smart object where it remembers all those little settings. And if I choose to rotate it again, instead of getting a rectangle that's straight, this rectangle still lines up with the contents. And in fact, I could look up here in the options bar and see the amount it was originally rotated, it was rotated 28.76 degrees. And I could even type in zero and it would bring it right back to the original angle. And if I come over here and transform, and I say I'd like to scale this and I make it absolutely tiny. Well, if I zoom up on it, it's still gonna look like it. Not that great. There's not all that much info in there. But the thing is I just zoomed out. Uh The thing is if I were to double click on the smart object to actually see its contents, nothing in there has changed. So inside the smart object here, I'll double click. It's still the full sized image. It's the exact size it was. At the time the smart object was created, I'll close that. And so when I scale it back up, I'll just come in here and scale. The scaling always is based on the original contents of the smart object. And so the quality can look great here and I could choose exactly what size I want, press return or enter to indicate I'm done. So if you ever think that you might scale an image down and need to scale it back up again. Uh in the future, converting into a smart object first will make it so any and all scaling of that when it comes to going to the edit menu and using transform will always be based on the original contents that is inside that smart object. And therefore it doesn't matter if you scale it really far down and really far up. And I think I ran into that when we were talking about layers in my original beginning kind of layers uh session, I had a picture that I scaled down. And later on, I decided, oh I want to use this much bigger. And when I did it looked more like this where it started looking soft and it would have been better if I converted it into a smart object first. All right, let's close this up and let's go for another image. Now in this image, I've created a little bolt here and I made it out of a couple layers. All I did was come and use this tool which is a shape tool. And I said I wanted an ellipse and I did this. If you hold shift, you get a circle and that was kind of the base and I could change the color of it up here. I might make it, I don't know a medium brightness. And then I styled that I went to the bottom of my layers panel, I came down here and I said, let's do a Bevel emboss. And that gave me if I adjust the size here, the little kind of dimension that it has. And also in this list on the left side, which is the same list that was in that little pop up menu that I chose. Bevel and boss from. We can turn on other effects and let's try a pattern overlay, uh pattern overlay, We could put in all sorts of patterns here. Uh You could make it look kind of grungy. Then you could scale that grunge to make it just feel like it's got some texture and maybe lower the opacity. So it's just a hint, just something. So it doesn't feel so smooth. Uh Anyway, we could do something like that. Um Then I want this to separate from the background so I could turn on this thing called drop shadow. We got the separation. All right. So that, that could be the base. Then in here there is another tool and it is in here, the polygon and with the polygon up at the top here, you can type in how many sides you want. And I'm just gonna type in six because I think most of those bolts with the little Allen key thing uh use six sides and then I could click and drag like this a whole shift to make sure it's perfectly sized where it's proportional and do that again on the right side could change the color where it says fill and I'll just choose a darker shade maybe. Well, this one, uh, then I might select that and the other one at the same time. And if I'm in my move tool, when I do that, we have alignment up here and I'll just say center it horizontally, center it vertically and then I'll go back and just work on the single layer and I could do something like do what's called an inner shadow and also do an in boss. Anyway, if I did that, I'd end up with this kind of an edge on it. So I'm just telling you that this is built up from simple pieces. I'm not gonna build the whole thing though because I want to talk about smart objects and not the shape tool and layer styles. But anyway, here, if I turn off the, that's one layer and if I turn this off, that's another. And each one of those are styled, I just happen to use more styles to make mine fancier. But otherwise those are just simple shapes. So I'm gonna take both of those and I'm gonna turn them into a smart object. So the two are gonna look as if they're merged into one. All right. Now, here's something cool. I'm gonna duplicate that layer and there are many different ways of duplicating. Uh Let me just share the three most common if you drag a layer to the new layer icon down here at the bottom and let go, you just made a duplicate and then I could use my move tool and I could move that, let's say over here. Another way you could do it, which is what I use most commonly is to go to the layer menu and choose new. And right here is layer via copy. And the reason I use it is I like the keyboard shortcut. I think of it as jumping something to a new layer command J. There is another one here, duplicate layer but there's no keyboard shortcut. So I like command J. So watch my layers panel, I'll type command J just got another one. All right. Then another way of duplicating a layer would be to use the move tool and be about to move this thing in the moment you click and before you click hold option option means make a copy or work on a copy. So I'm gonna option click and drag and therefore I could create as many of these bolts as I want very quickly by holding down that option key and dragging. And that's what I'm doing here. And I'm just going to make this one active and make sure it aligns. OK? Now we got a nice little design. Now here's something cool about smart objects. Whenever you duplicate a smart object, it doesn't think that those duplicates are independent. Instead it thinks they point back to the same original. So you have multiple instances of the same smart object. So that's kind of interesting. Um What does that mean? Well, that means if I double click on any one of these smart objects, it does not matter which one it will bring me into the same contents. And let's say I wanted to change this. What I'd like to do is make it so that the bolt that's here, I'm gonna type command t to transform that. It's a little smaller in the middle and it's rotated a little bit like that and then I'm gonna press return and maybe I turn off one of the effects that's here. I think I have like a little texture in here. So let's go in there and turn off the pattern overlay. All right there. So anyway, the main thing is I made a change. Now, let's close this and save the changes. And over here, notice every single one of them changed here, I'll just choose undo command Z. There's before, here's after, before, after. So whenever you duplicate a smart object, it thinks of it as another instance of the same smart object and going back and editing that smart object would update them all. And that's kind of cool and you can use it for all sorts of things if you want to get an idea. Let me open an example here. I created this shape, using the shape tool, this thing because you can draw ellipses like this and then you can draw a second one and you can make it. So when you draw the second one up here, you tell it, how should it combine or change the one you currently have? And I'm gonna choose just one of these options uh of maybe intersect. And now I'm just gonna draw a second shape. And when I do, you'll see that this kind of combines with the other one. And again, I could change, I could say no, let's make that subtract from it or whatever. And I could draw a bunch of these things using different modes that are up here to add to or take away from. And when I click away from it, I just get the resulting shape. Well, I did something like that but I spent a lot of time on it to get just what I liked then to give it this kind of three dimensional shiny look. I used layer styles. If I turn off these layer styles, you'll see it's just a shape sitting there. What's giving it its color is called a color overlay. What's giving it a good amount of its shape is something called belon emboss. And then I added a few accessories, a little drop shadow to make it feel like it's separating from the background and then something called satin and satin's barely doing anything. You might be thinking, hey, I've used these before and I haven't got Devlin and boss to look like that. Well, all you do is here, I'll double click on Devlin and boss. And if you look at it, what I mainly did is here, there's something weird. It's called a gloss contour and I made it look like a up and down thing, whereas usually it looks like this. But if you go to one of these, you can get a funky version. Anyway, the main thing is I spent time to build up this. Well, now what I wanna do is come in and convert this to a smart object. OK? Now it's one piece. Now it can't see that those styles are built in to there. It doesn't know how this was created. And before I have some guides, let me show them again, I'll type command h all they're doing is marking the center of the document and now check this out. I'm going to duplicate this layer. We using any of the techniques I showed you a moment ago. I'll just type command J. So in the layers panel, you see there's a second version. Now, then I'm gonna come up here and I'm gonna say let's rotate this. And when I rotate it, you don't always get this little cross here in the middle, but that's what it's gonna pivot around. If you don't see the cross here, you need to turn on a check box in the upper left up here in the options bar. Well, you can click and drag that. I'm gonna move it to the center of the document right there. Then I'm gonna rotate this. When you rotate, usually you can rotate to any angle. If you hold shift though, it'll do it in, I think like 15% increments. If I remember right? And I'm gonna do it to about there, press return or enter, then I'm just gonna repeat this process again and again and again. So what it was it, it was command J to duplicate the layer. And then this time instead of coming up here and choosing transform, rotate, I'm gonna use free transform because it has a keyboard shortcut. I'll just type command T I'll move this to the center once again and then I'm gonna rotate it another 45 degrees holding shift to make sure that it is uh a consistent amount I'm going to press return or enter and I'm just gonna do it again and again. So I'll speed this up. So you don't have to watch me do every little thing, but command J command t move that little center over here. If I wasn't working on a smart object, I'd be able to use uh another feature which is um there is a choice when you go up to transform called again and again, simply means use the exact same settings more than once. But unfortunately, that feature is grayed out when you are working with smart objects. And therefore it won't help us here. Anyway, command J means duplicate, command, T means transform. Then I'm transforming around that same uh spot each time. OK? Look at that. Let's hide the edges. I'll take command just so we don't see our guides. Well, I love that. Um But let's see what I don't love about it is if you look here, do you see this portion? And you notice this little curve here, it looks like the loop makes it around where it's beyond this. But when I look at the end of this one, notice that it ends short, I want this to stick out a little further so that it looks as if it can go a little further. Uh So how can I do that same thing here and, and so on? Well, these are smart objects and if I edit one smart object, it's going to end up editing them all. So I'm gonna double click on any one of these layers right on the thumbnail image. So I can see it. And in fact, you can make two images show up side by side. If you come up here to the window menu and choose a range, I'm gonna say two up vertical and then I can see both images right next to each other. I'll zoom out on. Well, let me click on the one on the right zoom out and then I'm gonna modify the shape of this thing. I'll just go over here to that document and this was made in such a way that I can use this little arrow tool to edit it. And I just need to figure out which end do I need to change? I'm thinking it is maybe this end and I just can't have it hidden because my command each hid things and I'm just gonna grab these little pieces that make up the end and I'm gonna pull on this just a little bit, maybe moving it like that. What I'm trying to do is just get that to extend a little further. I'm gonna type command S and when I do, it's gonna save this and it saves it back into here. So I just typed command S and it just updated. So now I can see that maybe I want it a little less. So I pull this back just a little bit type command s to see the other one update. And maybe I, I like that now, but I want the other end to be different. So I grab some of its pieces and I wanna pull it in, uh just a little bit type command desk and it updates. All right. Well, that's getting pretty darn fancy. Let's close that the other thing I did to this is I changed the color of each one of these. You could just do a hue and saturation adjustment layer uh and just move the hue and you can change these to any colors you want. And if you want it to only affect one layer, then there's this little down pointing arrow and that means only affect the layer that this is directly above. So if I did that to every one of these layers, just do a new hue and saturation adjustment layer and just swing this around. So you get a different color but make it only affect one of them. I could get each one of these to be a different color. And I did that. I do this when I'm watching TV. That is not as exciting as it should be, but I don't feel like turning off, I go into Photoshop and I play and I'll make things like this. But the main thing is without a smart object, I would have no clue how to adjust the length of any of these and get it to change them all. So let's get fancy here. Um Here we have Lisbon and what I'd like to do is I don't think it separates from the background enough. So I would like something behind it that lets us separate. So let's look at just this. And what I'm gonna do is duplicate the layer with command J, then I'll work on the layer uh that's underneath, hiding the one that's on top for now. I don't want it to be red. I want it to be black. Well, down here under the letters FX, there is a choice called color overlay and it just means overlay a color on this layer, but it ends up respecting where the edges of the layer were and I'll just come over here and choose black. All right. Then this is a smart object and because of that, I can easily apply a filter to it. Well, I'm gonna come in here and try a motion blur and I'll just set this angle to be similar to the angle I see in the picture. Maybe, well, actually, maybe a little bit like that and we'll just get a bit of a blur and that's what I want to have behind. All right. So let's just turn the text on on top. Do you see that little bit of separation? That's the motion blurred version that's full of black and then we put on our background picture and you see that little separation that's helping out you can still see what's back there, but that's nicely uh separated now. So we're getting kind of fancy there. But these are smart objects. This is a duplicate of that smart object. So it thinks it's the same thing. So now I could double click on the smart object and change the text. It's just a type player. I'm just gonna put in my name, Ben, I will put Benny and then I'll close that. Well, I gotta stop editing my texts up there. Now I can close it, save it and look, it says Benny and if I hide the image underneath and I hide the red text. So does the blurred black um shadow like thing behind it. And that's because when you duplicate a smart object, you're thinking that you're having the same thing there. And I just need to think around how could I change the color of that? And there are many different ways you could change the color. But what I used was called a color overlay. But then there's something even cooler about it. And that is if I did not use a smart object, then let's say uh well, here, I'll work on this uh one called Lisbon. Let's have two of them in here. I'll use just the text tool just to compare. I'll just that's fine for text. Uh This is just a type layer. Now, if I go up to the filter menu and I attempt to blur it, I can blur it. I can come over here and say I want a motion blur, but it's gonna tell me you can't do that and still have that text uh be something you could change. So it's suggesting that I use a smart object. If I don't use a smart object, it says raster eye that means turn into normal pixels where it's not a special text layer. So I'm gonna choose raster and let's just blur it. All right. Click. OK. Now, what if I decided the amount of blur on there was too great but I saved and closed this document and I'm working on it a month later. Well, if I go to the filter menu, I go back to blur and I choose motion blur. It has no idea that I ever blurred that layer. So the only thing this motion blur can do is add additional motion blur. If I bring it down to zero, I just get what it looked like immediately before I applied this time with the filter. That's not what I want. Well, let's throw that away. And remember down here, we had a layer, I've already applied motion blur to it. And the way motion blur got applied was special because this was a smart object and it could not change the contents of that smart object, the actual interior contents. So the way the filter was applied is as what's known as a smart filter. All a smart filter is is a filter that's been applied to a smart object. So let's open it up this little arrow. Let's just see what's there. We have our color overlay that's called a layer style. Uh But then down here it says smart filters and right there is motion blur watch, I can turn it off and there's the without motion blur or I can double click right here on the word motion blur. And if I do it brings me right back into motion blur, but this time, it's not like we had a moment ago. This time, it says if I'm in my original version of the motion blur, so if I bring it down to the lowest setting, you can see I can get it back to the way it used to look. It's so that these settings are not permanent. It's just a setting attached to the layer, a setting that can be changed or removed afterwards. That's what's known as a smart filter and all it is is it's a smart object with a filter attached to it. And so here I could just double click on that to get back or if I wanted to blur it again, maybe in a different direction or something, I could just come back up motion blur. And now if you look in the layers panel, I just have two of them, one's applied on top of the other. So now I'll do it this way and they're separate. I could double click on either one and if I wanted to turn one off, just turn off the eyeball or I can turn the other one off whatever I'd like, but you could pile up as many filters as you want on this and none of them are permanent. And if you up here, this eyeball just means if I have more than one of these, this turns them off altogether. So none of them apply. You also have this, that's a layer mask, it's actually a smart filter mask. But if you click on that, then you could grab your paintbrush tool and I could come in here and say, let's remove the filter just from right there. Uh And you can see the black paint in here. And so it just means hide these filters from wherever I put black in here. So you can get fancy as you want. Well, we can get a lot fancier and there's other stuff. Huh? Well, let's completely use a different kind of smart object, something we haven't even touched on before. Uh Here I have a raw file. I'm gonna double click on it here in bridge. Anytime you attempt to open a raw file, you always get camera raw because Photoshop doesn't know how to deal with a raw file. Well, in here, what I did is first I attempted to work on this image using the features within Adobe camera raw and that means I wanted to mask my sky. So I only affected it darken it up and that kind of stuff, but I simply was not happy with the way it turned out. And that's because the masking in Adobe camera raw is somewhat crude. And so I could easily see around here where it didn't look right. So I took a different approach. What I did is I adjusted the image as a whole until I liked the look of these uh, vines that are here. We're a winery here in New Zealand, by the way. Uh And once I got it dialed in. So I thought those look great. I went to these icons over here on the right side and one of those icons looks like little squares overlapping. It's known as a snapshot. And all this snapshot is, is remembering the settings you're currently at so you could get back to them later. And I ended up saving one just by clicking this icon here and I called it vines. That's what we're looking at right now. Then I started completely over and I said, now let's ignore the vines. Let's ignore my wife Karen and let's concentrate only on the sky and I moved the sliders around until I loved the look of the sky. But the vines looked terrible. Or Karen looked terrible. And I came over here and I made another snapshot. That's what this is. Do you see how everything else is too dark in there? And I just did that multiple times. I even did it for her skin. I did it for her shirt and I did it for her pants because I found originally when I was working on this image, regardless of what I did, I didn't like the look of those areas. So I happen to have snapshots and you don't have to use snapshots. I'm just showing you how I got those settings in there. Now, I'm about to open this image into Photoshop. I'm about to click the open button but watch the open button and look what happens if I hold down shift. So I let out hold down shift. You notice it says open object. That means smart object. If you open a raw file as a smart object, which I'm doing right now. If you look in the layers panel, you get that little icon which means it's a smart object and this acts like a smart object for instance if I typed command J a few times. So we have duplicates then um these are multiple instances of the same smart object. But with a normal smart object, if I double click on it, I'd see its contents and this is a raw file. So if I double click on this, let's see what happens. It brings up camera raw. That means I could change the raw settings just to show you that I'm gonna make it black and white. So it's obvious and I'll click on. OK. But look at my layers panel and notice, do you see all three of the layers changed? Well, that's just like having that document that had those little bolts in it where we had multiple and then I went and changed one of the bolts inside the smart object and it updated them all. Well, I didn't want them all to update. Let's choose undue and I'll choose it a few times till I get back to just that one layer is if I just opened the file. Now, here's something special layer smart objects, new smart object via copy. The key here is the word new. That means not a copy of the existing one, but a brand new independent smart object that has no idea what it came from. And therefore is not another instance of the smart object that's already here. So this is gonna look as if I duplicate that layer. But if I were to double click on this one and I were to change the settings, I'll make mine black and white and click. OK? You'll notice in the layers panel, only one of them changed. And therefore I could double click on this one. And I could say I wanna go over to my snapshots and I'd like the snapshot that made the sky look good. Uh And I can come in here and click. OK? Now we have two versions of the picture and I could do whatever I want to combine these two together. Most likely using a layer mask to limit where this one shows up. I could potentially come up here to the select menu and say I want to select my sky. And then I could add a layer mask whenever you have a selection active. At the time you add a layer mask, uh it ends up automatically filling in that layer mask where only the area selected ends up um being visible. So now I have that just where the sky is, then I can repeat the process. I'll just go back to the original and remember it was layer smart objects, new smart object via copy. I'll put that one maybe up on top and let's double click on it this time. Let's optimize it for something else. Um Maybe let's optimize it for her skin. Then I'll click. OK. And now I would like to mask this. So it only applies where her skin is. Well, I'd have to get a selection and I'm not gonna do that right now because it's just a matter of uh thinking about the selection tools. But here I'll add a mask, maybe fill it with black and I'll grab my paintbrush and just to show you, I could come in here and paint that in just where her skin is. Hm. In her hand, I might need to use a different tool. I'll work on the layer that's underneath because this layer has a lot hidden and it might not be able to tell what the heck that was. There we go. We got our hand. I'll come up here and I'm just going to work on that mask and I'll fill this with white because white in a mask allows whatever is in that layer to show up. Now, I got it where her hand is, see that and I could continue to build this up and I've already done that. Let me open the version where I did. Here it is this one, I just could not get it to be satisfactory using Adobe camera raw. When I tried, just nothing worked. Uh Let me turn off a few layers here and here you can see those individual pieces. If I turn off my sky, you can see there it is. If I turn off my shirt, there it is. If I turn off the pants, you can see it's making the pants better and here's her skin had I not done that wouldn't look good from those other versions. And then of course, I have the base of the vines, which is what is filling in the rest. And then I got some other stuff on top. That's just me finishing off the image. There are some things over here that we're distracting like this little guy and so my weaves be gone is me retouching and then here's some adjustments to find fine tune the image. But the main thing is you can, if you want to, when you're opening a raw file, hold down the shift key and the button that you use to open it with will change to open object and then there'll be a copy of the original raw file in that layer. And if you double click on it, you could modify the settings for it. That's the main thing. And if you wanna be able to have more than one version of it, then you can come in. And what you want to do is not just do a standard duplicate of the layer. Instead you need to choose layer smart objects, new smart object via copy. And that means one that is independent of all the others. All right, now let's talk about one other type of smart object. What I have here is a two page spread for a book that I wrote many years ago that was called up to speed. What it did is it covered only the new features when a new version of Photoshop came out, but now they come out with new features. So often a book would be out of date uh too soon. So I stopped writing the series of books. But this would be a chapter opener where when you get to a new chapter, there would be an image on the left side, there would be the name of the book here and then right down here would be the chapter number and the name of the chapter. Well, I have this layout, which is for one chapter, but then I have this for a different chapter. Then I have this for yet another chapter. And what I need is the right side here to contain what I find here. Now, I could always just take that layer and duplicate it, move it over to those other documents. But I want flexibility because maybe I wanna update the design that's here. Maybe I want to, I don't know, change the colors that are in this little flame or something. And I want to update across all the other documents. Well, when I built this page on the right, I built it and then turn it into a smart object. So if you look in my layers panel, you'll see right? There is the smart object icon. And if I double click on it, this is the contents of that uh smart object. You don't see the full contents because this is up above the end of the page. But that's what's inside of it. So how can I now use this in other documents as a smart object but be able to update its contents and have it update all the other documents. Hmm Because usually one document is completely independent of the others we can do it. Here's how you do it, you choose layer smart objects. And if the layer I'm working on is already a smart object. Let's convert to linked when I choose that, what it wants me to do is save this as a file on my hard drive. And I'm just gonna call it up to speed uh chapter opener, right page because that's what it is. And I'll just put it in the same folder as the original files and hit save. So now if you look in my layers panel, we no longer have the normal smart object icon. Instead it looks like a little chain. And what that means is this the contents of the smart object are not contained within this file instead, they are contained within that other file, the file that I just saved on my hard drive. So now I can get this over to the other documents in a couple different ways. The way that I just want to show you, but it's not the most ideal in this particular case is I could go to the file menu and there's a choice in here. It, what it is is it's called place and you can either place embedded or place linked. What that should be called is place as a smart object. But I'm gonna choose place linked and I'm just gonna point it at that file. I just saved and it'll open it up and I could put it over here on this side. The only problem is it's not sized to this. Remember, it's got info that goes up above the page. So I'd have to scale it and position it just right and it'd be hard to get it to be consistent. So I'm actually gonna hit escape because I don't want to do that instead. What I'll do is I still want the same end result, but I'm just gonna use the move tool. I'm gonna grab this and I'll move it up here to the other tab. I'll drag my mouse down here. And the trick is if you hold shift before you let go, it means put it in the exact same spot as it was in the document. It came from and therefore it went right there. The only time that works where you could drag it up to another tab, drag down here and then hold shift is if the documents are exactly the same size, if they're not the same size, it would center it instead. But anyway, now I have the same graphic in three different files here. And let's see, maybe we can view all those files. I'll just say tile all and that means just show me them all side by side there so you can see them. So there are our images. We got them all in there in each and every one of these is a linked smart object. So I could either manually go and open that file that was saved on the hard drive or I'm just gonna double click on the little icon for the smart object. You know that thumbnail on any one of the files doesn't matter which one. And that's gonna open that file for me. Then I'm gonna modify this. I'm just gonna come in and I'm gonna add a motion blur behind up to speed that's there. Uh And maybe I decide not to use the black bar that's there. Those are the changes I'm gonna make and I'm just gonna type command S and when I type command s look at the other files, I think I want the black bar. Let me turn it back on. Then I'll type command S and then I can close this file and you'll see all of them updated. And that's because these smart objects, the original contents is not contained within these files, it's contained within a separate file. How did I do that? Well, I had a layer that was already a smart object. I went to the layer menu, went down here to smart objects and there was a choice called convert to linked. Well, that one's already linked. So it's odd that that's even uh available there. But uh that's what allowed me to save it out as a separate file. That if I wanted to use it in other documents, I either go to the file menu and choose place linked or if I needed it in the exact same size and location in multiple documents I do to the drag and drop trick that I showed you. But therefore I could use this logo on the cover of my book. I could use it on the back in a different way. I could use it on all chapter openers. And in the end, if I decide that I want the letters to, to be a different color, I could just update that linked logo file and all the other things would update. Now, they're not gonna update unless they're open. And if you open them in the future, there would be a little um triangle, yellow triangle where that link symbol was to indicate that it's been updated. But this file hasn't been and there's a choice to update all um content or update all link content. Uh But anyway, I just wanted to show you there was a way to use smart objects between two documents. All right, then to finish things off, I'm just gonna show you an example of how you can use smart objects in a crazy way once you get used to them. So here is a book that I wrote a very long time ago and this is the cover of it. And inside the book, I showed a picture of the book. Then the book didn't yet exist. So somehow I made this picture to use within the book. Well, the way that was done is with a lot of smart objects. Let's take a look at the graphic that was there. Here was the graphic for the cover of the book in there. We have a fan of leaves. It's right here. Do you see that? That's a smart object. Let me open it. Here's what it looks like in there. There are individual leaves, those are smart objects. Do you remember when we had that one squiggly shape I made and we duplicated it in around a circle. This is similar thing if I go into one of these smart objects and double click on it, all it is is a leaf. So that means I started with this leaf, I turned it into a smart object, then I duplicated that smart object and I rotated it duplicate, rotate, duplicate, rotate, duplicate, rotate exactly what we did before. The only difference here is when I was done, I changed the color of each one. I mean, I showed you how to do that with hue and saturation. I just happen to do it with what's called a layer style. Um But I could have done it with hue and saturation. The only key there is hue and saturation cannot change something that's not already in color. So it has a check box inside called color rise. And then you can dial in the color you want. So you could create exactly this using the general technique that I showed you. So anyway, that's that fan of leaves. Once I got the fan of leaves, I turn that into a smart object. Why? Because if you look in here at the background, it's also used right here. Do you see this kind of ghosted back version of it right there? If I look at that background, there's a copy of the fan of leaves and it just happens to be that I, I messed with it where I put it in screen mode which can only lighten things and played with stuff. So anyway, you don't have to totally understand that. But let's just see what I could do because I use smart objects. I'm gonna go into that fan of leads double click on it. I'm gonna go into one of those smart objects and double click on it and let's put something else in there. Let's just go on our hard drive and here I got a bowling pin. Let's open that I could have just double clicked on it. And I'm gonna just take that. I think it's already sized for it and I'm just gonna drag it over, put it in here, close the original and let's hide the leaf. So now we got a bowling pin. All right, let's close that it'll ask if I want to save it. And when I do, it's gonna update that smart object. So instead of containing a leaf, it now contains a bowling pin, it remembers all the other stuff that it was applied to those smart objects. So I have that. So let's close this and when I do, it'll ask if I want to save it and when I do, it'll update this more complex image, but it didn't just update that. It updated the background. I don't know if you can see it in there, but now those are bowling pins because that was a copy of that particular smart object. Your brain should be melting about now, just so, you know, but then let's say I like this update I did. And what I'd like to do now is I'm going to close it and when I close it, I'm gonna save it. And let's just say I happen to have used that image to lay out the actual text with that graphic on the cover of the book. And when I did, I used a linked smart object. Well, then when I opened this file instead of having this graphic, well, it should show me over here in my layers panel. Do you see this layer? Which is the graphic? It's got a little warning symbol on it. And if I look up here, it tells me that here's the name of it, which has got a terrible name. And there's that warning symbol again. Well, if I click on this little icon right up here on the properties panel, there's a choice update, modified content. I think that might also appear over here under here. Uh Let's see if it does. Yeah, update modified content. And if I had more than one layer that used a linked smart object, I could update all of them at once. So I'm gonna update my modified content so that now it looks like we have bowling pins in there, then let's close this and when we do, let's save it. And then what if I mocked up the cover of my book? Because I actually wanted to show a picture of the book within the book. Well, the book didn't exist yet. So uh I'd have to mock something up. Let's open that up and that tells me the same thing. I see that let's go over there and update modified content and now it has bowling pins as well. Save that, close it, head back to bridge. And now you can see how smart objects can absolutely completely change the way you think about working in Photoshop. And the most basic level when Photoshop doesn't allow you to do something like warping or applying a filter to multiple layers. And you don't want to merge those layers together into one. Well, just convert it to a smart object, it'll look like one layer and it'll fake out any feature that is limited on what kind of layer that it can work on. And then you can do that, then you can end up using multiple instances of the same smart object. And therefore, if you update one, it'll update the others. And that's how I had the word Lisbon after I had transformed it here and I had a blurry version behind and they both updated when I changed that text or you can embed a raw file. And if you embed a raw file, you can have different settings and modify them because there's a copy of that original raw file embedded right into your Photoshop file and double click on it, you can change the settings and do new smart object via copy. And you can have more than one version that has different settings applied. And therefore you can use Photoshop's masking instead of the more simplified masking that is in uh camera raw. And then you can use smart objects between multiple documents. In order to do so the smart object must be a linked, one linked to a file on your hard drive. So if you have a smart object and you want to use it between others, you go to the layer menu to smart objects. And there is a choice in there called convert to linked. And that gets you to save it on your hard drive, then you could use it in other documents. And if you update the file that was saved into it would update all of those. And then you can use a smart object inside of a smart object inside of a smart object if you want or but just multiple layers. In this case, I have this image which is used as a link linked smart object in this image, which is used as a linked smart object in this image. I doubt you're gonna get that crazy. But I just wanted to show you how far you could push it. Well, I know we went through a whole bunch of techniques. When it comes to smart objects. You don't have to do everything like that, especially not as crazy as that last example, but just at least get started with smart objects. It might be as simple as opening a raw file and holding down that shift key when you do so that you could end up applying different raw settings on different layers and using Photoshop's more sophisticated masking to combine those together or maybe it's where you want to use something over and over again and when you edit one, they all update smart objects to me are amazing.