From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Advanced

Three ways to create a Smart Object - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Advanced

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Three ways to create a Smart Object

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- [instructor] In this first project you're going to experience the sheer power of smart objects by taking this unremarkable little car sitting against this fake background by the way made all the more obvious by the fact that we can see reflections of a house as well as another car. And we're going to cover up those reflections with some flames. Now in all, we'll be adding three flames which will give me the opportunity to demonstrate the three ways to import photographic images and smart objects into Photoshop. Now method number one is to go ahead and open the image like so and then make sure your rectangular marquee tool is active which you can get by pressing the M key and then right click anywhere inside the image window and choose duplicate layer. Now we'll go ahead and set the destination document to little black car and I'll name the layer, flame one and click OK. All right now go ahead and switch over to that image. And you can see that we now have an independent layer here inside the layers panel. And I want you to notice the appearance of this thumbnail. As usual we're seeing a tiny version of the image itself surrounded by a checkerboard pattern which indicates the areas where the layers transparent but things change if I convert the layer to a smart object. And to do that, you want to right click anywhere inside the image window. Again, it's very important that you're working with the rectangular marquee tool and then choose this command convert to smart object. And now we'll see a little page icon in the bottom right corner of that thumbnail. And that tells us that we have now taken the layer and placed it inside of a smart object which will protect it from harm. So that we can end it the layer in just about any way imaginable without damaging a single pixel. All right, now I'm going to go ahead and press the control key or the command key on the Mac to temporarily access the move tool. And with that key down i'll drag that layer over just so that we have a little more room to work and I'll show you the second method for creating a smart object, which is to go into the file menu and choose this command place embedded. And by the way, the word embedded means that the image will reside entirely inside the composition rather than being linked to a file on disk. Anyway, go ahead and choose that command. And then you want to locate the file you want to place in my case, flame-2.jpg, and then click the place button to add it to the composition. Now notice when you first placed an image you get a little transformation boundary which works just as we saw in the previous chapter. So in other words, I can drag a corner handle in order to scale the layer proportionally nowadays if you want to scale non proportionally press in hold the shift key like so, I can position my cursor just slightly outside the boundary and drag in order to rotate that image and all of this is happening non-destructively as i'll demonstrate in future movies, all right, to finish the process I'll press the enter key here on the PC or the return key on the Mac. And we end up with yet another smart object as indicated by the appearance of this little page icon in the bottom right corner of the layers thumbnail. All right, now we'll go ahead and control or command drag that layer so that it's out of the way. All right, now let's take a look at the third method for creating a smart object which is to return to the file menu and choose place linked which means that we'll be linking to a file on disk as I'll explain in just a moment at which point I'll go ahead and select flame-3.jpg and click the place button. And again, we have a transformation boundary. If we want to take advantage of it I'm just going to move it over by dragging the image and then I'll press the enter or return key to complete that place operation. Now notice a slight difference here inside the layers panel this time, instead of a little page icon in the bottom, right corner of the thumbnail, we're seeing a little chain icon. If you can make it out, which tells us that this smart object is linked to an image file on disk. And so for those of you who are familiar with Adobe design applications, the place linked command the one we just used works just like the regular old place command in illustrator or InDesign. And so the upside is that if you're working with a team then somebody else who has access to that image file in our case, flame-3.jpg they can make changes to it. And those changes will be reflected in your larger composition. The downside and this is a big downside is that you have to make sure you have access to that original image file at all times and that it doesn't get moved or renamed or deleted which isn't the way things typically work inside Photoshop. Generally speaking, when you're placing images into a layered composition, whether they're smart objects or otherwise you want those images to be embedded so that you don't have to keep track of a bunch of linked image files. And as things currently stand Photoshop does not provide a method for managing your links. And so what you might want to do at this point. Is once again, right, click inside the image window in this time, choose embed linked. And that will go ahead and embed the current layer at which point the little link icon in the bottom right corner of the layers thumbnail will be replaced by a page icon indicating that this flame is embedded along with the others inside a single layered PSD file. And so you might ask, what is the difference between these three methods while in the end there is no difference for each of these flames. We have a pixel based image file protected inside an indestructable smart object which has embedded entirely inside this multi layer composition. And those are the three ways to place photographic images inside smart objects that will henceforth protect them from harm here inside Photoshop.

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