Creating and Using Smart Objects

While we're on the subject of organizing and grouping layers , new in Photoshop CS2 are Smart Objects. Smart Objects are content from your images in the form of one or more layers that you can edit externally to the image in which they originally resided. You can edit a Smart Object in Photoshop, but in a separate image window, or edit it in a vector-based program such as Adobe Illustrator. If you do edit a Smart Object outside of its original image, when you return the object to the image, its changes are brought back with it; and in the case of an object edited in a vector-based program, the prodigal object is rasterized upon its return to a Photoshop image.

Why turn your layers into a Smart Object? If you want to edit the content outside of Photoshop and then bring it back seamlessly later, Smart Objects are the way to go. Of course, you could simply copy the layers to a new image, save the image in a vector-friendly format (such as EPS, for example) and then open the new image in Illustrator, edit it there, and then bring it back to Photoshop, open it, copy its contents, and then paste them back into their original Photoshop image, but that would be a lot of work, and a lot of steps, wasting time and creating potential problems, such as those that would occur if you skipped a step or saved the file in the wrong format on the way out of Photoshop.

Another advantage to using Smart Objects is that you can scale, rotate, skew, or warp them losslessly. This means that you don't lose details as you edit and create pixels to fill in as the image content changes size , position, shape, and so on. Essentially, turning content into a Smart Object reduces error because you protect content. You can easily move Smart Objects back and forth between images and applications without loss of detail.

Creating a new Smart Object

To turn content into a Smart Object, simply select the layer or layers from within any Photoshop image ” it can be a PSD or TIFF file, or saved in any other format that supports the use of layers. With the layer or layers selected, choose Layer Smart Objects Group Into New Smart Object. After a brief pause (a Progress bar that states that it's "Merging Layers" will probably appear), your layer or layers appear as shown in Figure 5-17. This Figure shows a Smart Object called "main window," which consists of three former layers ” "Skeleton," "Moon," and "Mountains." The three layers were combined into a single Smart Object, and the name of the topmost layer was applied to the object. You can rename an object the same way you'd rename a layer: just double-click the name in place and type a new one.

image from book
Figure 5-17: Select three layers (left images shows the "before" version of the Layers palette) and turn them into a Smart Object (right-hand version of the palette), complete with Smart Object icon in lower-right corner of the Smart Object thumbnail.
Tip  

You can use the Layers palette to create your Smart Objects, too. Select the layer or layers you want to make a Smart Object, and right-click (Ctrl+click on the Mac) to display a pop-up menu. Choose Group into New Smart Object from the menu, and the object is created. You can also find the Layers Smart Objects submenu commands ” New Smart Object Via Copy, Edit Contents, Export Contents, and Replace Contents ” in this pop-up menu.

Editing Smart Objects

So you've made a Smart Object. Now what do you do with it? You can double-click the object layer in the Layers palette or choose Layers Smart Objects Edit Contents. A large prompt window opens, shown in Figure 5-18, which gives you valuable instructions. After you finish your edits (you'll be working in a new image window with the object layers' content in it), choose File, Save to keep your changes. If you don't do so, the changes are not reflected in the original image. You can also save the changes to a new file ” a new file name, format, and location ” thus creating a new image from a Smart Object.

image from book
Figure 5-18: Take this good advice to make sure your edited Smart Object can return to the image from whence it came.

After clicking OK to acknowledge this great advice, you're presented with an image window, titled with the same name the Smart Object had when it was a layer in your original image. The format for the new image is PSB (large document format), and the image consists of the layer or layers you grouped into the Smart Object. Figure 5-19 shows the resulting PSB file, and you can see the three layers' content ” the Skeleton, Moon, and Mountains ” all part of the new image.

image from book
Figure 5-19: One Smart Object becomes a new image.

You can edit the new PSB file as you would any Photoshop file ” using any of the tools, commands, filters, and so forth that you want. For example, you can use the transform tools to rotate, skew, scale, and even warp the content. Warping, another new Photoshop CS2 feature, is discussed later in this chapter.

Tip  

Handling PSB files hogs a lot of system resources. If you think you'll be creating and editing a lot of Smart Objects, and you see that your system slows down to a crawl (or even gives you "scratch disks are full" prompts while you're editing them), consider increasing your RAM.

After you've finished your edits, you can choose File Save (Ctrl+S for Windows, z +S on the Mac) to save the object, and then return to your original image. The original image reflects any changes you made to the size, position, stacking order, and actual content of the object's layers (including new layers) while you edited it as a PSB file. You can then convert the Smart Object back into a layer, using the Layers Smart Objects Convert to Layer command. Bear in mind that Photoshop doesn't convert the Smart Object back into the multiple layers that may have made up the object from the beginning. Instead, a single layer is created from the Smart Object as a whole. Your History palette tells the real story of what's happened at this point, too; the state that appears when a Smart Object is converted to a layer is "Rasterize Smart Object." This reminds you that the object is preserving its content for vector-based editing, and to become a native part of a Photoshop image once again, you must rasterize it, and return it to a lowly gaggle of pixels.

Exporting and replacing Smart Objects

To export a Smart Object, select Export Contents from the pop-up menu that appears when you right-click (or Ctrl+click) the object. A Save dialog box opens, through which you can give your file a name (PSB is the default format, but you can pick another), and choose a location for the file. After you've saved the file, you can open it in Illustrator or any other vector-based editing program. You can also open it in Photoshop. After you complete the edits, you can save the image and then reopen the original image in Photoshop ” "original image" refers to the image that the original layers that became the object came from. The changes you made in the other program are reflected, and the content is re-rasterized.

If you choose Replace Contents from the Layer Smart Objects submenu, a dialog box opens, through which you can select another image ” any Photoshop- recognized file ” and use it to replace the Smart Object in your active image. The image you select literally replaces the Smart Object content, and becomes a new layer in the image. You can then edit that layer, restack it to reveal original content beneath it, or apply any other Photoshop tool, command, or filter to the replacement content.

Locking layers

Just like a Smart Object can protect selected layers from loss of quality when transferred to and from an external editing program, the Layers palette can protect a layer from any kind of changes by allowing you to lock it. Unlike other programs that lock or unlock layers in their entirety, however, Photoshop lets you lock some attributes of a layer and leave other attributes unlocked. Figure 5-20 shows the four Lock buttons available in the Layers palette at the top of the Layers palette. Here's how they work, from left to right:

image from book
Figure 5-20: The Lock buttons at the top of the Layers palette let you protect certain layer attributes.
  • Lock transparency: This button protects the transparency of a layer. When selected, you can paint inside a layer without affecting the transparent pixels. This option is so useful that an entire section of this chapter of this book is devoted to the topic.

    Cross-Reference  

    For more on transparency, see the section "Preserving transparency" later in this chapter.

  • Lock pixels: Select this button to prohibit the pixels in the active layer from further editing. Paint and edit tools no longer function, nor do filters or other pixel-level commands. However, you can still move and transform the layer as you like, including applying or changing layer styles and adjusting Opacity and Fill settings. Note that selecting this button dims and selects the Lock Transparency button as well. After all, if you can't edit pixels, you can't edit pixels ” whether they're opaque or transparent.

  • Lock position: Select this button to prevent the layer from being moved or transformed. You can, however, edit the pixels.

  • Lock all: To lock everything about a layer, select this button. You can't paint, edit, filter, move, transform, delete, or otherwise change a hair on the layer's head. About all you can do is duplicate the layer, move it up and down the stack, add it to a group, and merge it with one or more other layers. This button is applicable to layers and groups alike.

Photoshop shows you which layers are locked by displaying two kinds of lock icons in the Layers palette. As labeled in Figure 5-20, the hollow lock means one or more attributes are locked; the filled lock means all attributes are locked.



Photoshop CS2 Bible
Photoshop CS2 Bible
ISBN: 0764589725
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 95

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