From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

Three ways to create a smart object - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

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Three ways to create a smart object

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- [Narrator] In this first project, you're going to experience the sheer power of Smart Objects by taking this unremarkable little car sitting on this fake grass, you might notice, made all the more obvious by the fact that we can see this other car reflected in its side, and we're going to cover up that reflected car with some flame and we're going to add a rainbow in the background as well. Now, in all we'll be importing three flames, which will give me the opportunity to demonstrate the three ways to import photographic images as Smart Objects into Photoshop. Method number one is to go ahead and open the image like so and then make sure your Rectangular Marquee Tool is active here inside the Toolbox and then right click anywhere inside the image window and choose "Duplicate Layer." Now I'll go ahead and set the destination document to that little black car that we saw at the outset of the movie. And I'll change the name of this layer to Flame 1 and then I'll click OK. Alright, now I'll go ahead and switch over to that image, and you can see that we now have an independent layer inside this document. And I want you to notice the appearance of the layer's thumbnail. As usual, we see the image itself surrounded by a checkerboard pattern that indicates the areas in which the layer is transparent. But things change if I once again right click inside the image. Again, it's very important that you're working with the Rectangular Marquee Tool and then I choose Convert to Smart Object. Now, we see a little page icon in the lower right corner of that layer 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 edit the layer in just about any way imaginable without harming a single pixel. Alright, now I'm going to go ahead and Control Drag or Command Drag that layer over just so we have a little more room to work. And I'll show the second method for creating a Smart Object, which is to go on to the File menu and choose the Place Embedded command. And then you want to go ahead and locate the file you want to place, in my case Flame-2.jpg, and click the Place button to add it to the composition. Now notice when you first place an image, you get a little transformation boundary, which works just as we saw in the previous chapter, so, in other words, I could drag a corner handle in order to scale the layer. I could drag outside the boundary in order to rotate it, and so forth. And all of this, by the way, because we're creating a Smart Object, is happening non-destructively. Alright, to finish the process, I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac, and we end up with yet another Smart Object layer, as indicated by the appearance of this little page icon in the lower right corner of the layer's thumbnail. Alright, now I'm going to go ahead and Control drag or Command drag that guy over and now let's take a look at the third method for creating a Smart Object, which is to return to the File menu and this time, choose Place Linked, at which point, I'll go ahead and select Flame-3.jpg and click the Place button. Again, we have a transformation boundary if we want to take advantage of it. I'm just going to move it over and then press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to complete the placing process. Now notice a slight difference. This time, instead of a little page icon, we're seeing a little chain icon, which is indicating that this Smart Object is linked to an image file on disk. And so in this regard, placing works just like it does in Illustrator or InDesign, or some other program where you place photographic images into a document. The upside is that if you're working in a group, then somebody else who has access to that image file can make changes to it and those changes will be reflected in your larger composition. The downside is that you have to make sure you have access to that original image file at all times, which isn't the way things typically work inside Photoshop. Generally speaking, when you're placing images in Photoshop, whether they're Smart Objects or otherwise, you want those images to be embedded in the larger composition so that you don't have to keep track of a lot of linked images as well. And, as things currently stand now, Photoshop does not provide a dedicated linking panel. And so what you might want to do at this point if you don't want to link to a file on disk is just go ahead and right click inside the image window once again and choose Embed Linked and that will go ahead and embed the current layer at which point the little link icon in the lower right corner of the layer thumbnail will be replaced by a page icon, indicating that this image is embedded inside the larger 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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