Day 12: Smart Objects & Smart Filters I (Introduction)
Dave Cross
Lesson Info
23. Day 12: Smart Objects & Smart Filters I (Introduction)
Lessons
Class Introduction
19:04 2Overview of Days 1-15
54:32 3Overview of Days 16-30
1:11:53 4Preview of Content, Part 1 - Layers, Comps, Styles, Masks
49:10 5Preview of Content, Part 2 - Smart Objects and Paths
30:33 6Day 1 Introduction
13:31Day 1 Exploring Photoshop
16:51 8Day 1 Realistic Expectations
27:26 9Day 2: Best Practices I Part One
33:28 10Day 2 Best Practices I Part 2
25:59 11Day 3: Lay of the Land
55:16 12Day 4: Best Practices II – Working Non-Destructively
47:57 13Day 5: Layers I
58:50 14Day 6: Layers II
44:51 15Day 7: Layers III - Masks
1:01:47 16Bonus Video: "Layers"
09:05 17Bonus Video: "Vector Masks"
05:54 18Day 8: Getting Images In and Out
55:51 19Day 9: Resolution, File Size, Resizing
1:00:42 20Bonus Video: "Free Transform - Warping"
07:54 21Day 10: Cropping (Straightening)
49:38 22Day 11: Adjusting
56:22 23Day 12: Smart Objects & Smart Filters I (Introduction)
48:52 24Bonus Video: "Copying Smart Filters"
02:11 25Day 13: Smart Objects & Smart Filters II (More Advanced)
56:34 26Day 14: Retouching I (Replacing, Removing, Moving)
55:10 27Day 15: Retouching II (Fixing, Portrait Retouching)
1:01:28 28Day 16: Quiz & Review
53:05 29Day 17: Shapes, Paths, and Patterns
49:56 30Day 18: Selecting I
1:05:47 31Day 19: Selecting II (Compositing)
1:02:01 32Bonus Video: "Green Screen"
08:21 33Day 20: Type
1:03:45 34Day 21: Color
54:54 35Day 22: Painting & Brush Options
59:15 36Day 23: Automation I (Built-In, Not So Obvious)
58:04 37Day 24: Automation II (Actions)
1:00:05 38Bonus Video: "Actions"
04:20 39Day 25: Presets
53:47 40Day 26: Video
1:03:01 41Day 27: Finishing Touches
1:05:08 42Bonus Video: "Sharpen"
16:26 43Day 28: Tips and Tricks
52:22 44Day 29: Quiz, Review, Projects
1:01:30 45Day 30: Project, Strategies to Continue to Get Better
48:41Lesson Info
Day 12: Smart Objects & Smart Filters I (Introduction)
well here we are a day twelve and it's my one of my favorite topics and photo shop in recent memory and that is the world of smart objects and smart filters one of the most amazing abilities that hasn't come and force up in recent memory in fact probably in the long history of photo shop so just a quick here's my little nutshell history lesson for those give their kind of new to photo shop back in nineteen ninety one photo shop came out the first two versions of photo shop there were no such thing as layers with everything as if we were putting paint on a canvas basically so we had had no options for things like layers so on photo shop three when layers came out it was like one of those hallelujah moment we're like oh my gosh this is so much easier to have layers now was still very basic text you couldn't edit it believe it or not once you entered the texan little box he clicked ok it was no longer edible text but at least it was on layer by itself so layers at the time was one of most...
significant changes to roll a photo shop in my opinion the introduction of smart objects is equally important because it kind of changed the rules of the game things that we had to really worry about oh well I guess I'll have to live with that now you don't we already have the non destructive nature of layers and adjustment layers and things like that and throw into the mix this ability was smart objects let me just say there's very few times now in photo shop I find myself feeling oh well I guess I'll have to live with that because if I structure my document in the best way in terms of the smart approach then that means really there's not much I can run to argo you know what well I can't change that so we're gonna talk about two things in this lesson introducing smart objects and smart filters and then in a kind of part two tomorrow we'll take it up a notch and go into mohr examples of the kind of things that are possible to do with smart objects and smart filters and this is one of these things where whether you're a photographer or a graphic designer or a web designer whatever you do smart objects can offer some really wonderful capabilities and there's only a couple of downsizing let's talk about that first in fact seems ought to talk about the disadvantages first but let's get this out of the way when you include smart objects in your photoshopped file your file size gets larger and my responses okay I would happily have a larger file size in return for the benefits I get out of smart objects now some people worry that the file size will get so big they can't operate okay that's difference if you're getting error messages saying your run of the memory that's a little bit different and hopefully you can work around that but if file size gets a lot bigger that's a minor thing to me and the reason is getting bigger by the way is the smart object is actually embedded inside your document which turns out to be a benefit because it's a built in backup plan the other thing that throws people a curve at first which we'll see if we get into this is that you can't work directly on a smart object in other words if you convert an image to a smart obviously try and use a tool like the clone stamp or the healing brush it won't work but there's an easy work around so those air really the on ly two things that throw people off first and honesty those are minor details compared to the great advantages we have with smart objects so let's take a look I'll show you an example first of the basics of smart objects and kind of explain what's happening here so here's a typical scenario I've got a image that I've created its a little local on a layer by itself and when I look at the size is one hundred percent size that means it's a fairly small size so if I use free transformed command control t and I scale it down I'm holding down option or all in the shift key and I make a really small version of my local for some reason now that's it's news eyes that's one hundred percent so to speak and if I were to save this document and close it then I've lost ableto undo and that is my new size so let's pretend for a moment that I have done that that I have closed this document saved it just as is so now it's two weeks later I opened this document I look at it I go that's a little small let's scale that back up again once we've talked about before any time you scale something up you lose quality you can see right here it doesn't look very good anyone I hit enter it'll be better but still very poor because I've taken something small and scaled it up so let's undo to the point where we started and talk about what happens when if I convert this into a smart object now there's several ways to do it in typical photoshopped fashion you can right or control click and choose convert to smart object or you can go the layer menu and she was smart object convert to smart object either way it's the same thing and what that does is it now the only really visual change you see in this case is there's a little tiny icon that's appeared here we go in the corner of the thumbnail that's really the on ly clue there is to tell you that something has changed so now if I free transform and scale it down really small and hit enter same scenario I close it I save it and then I come back two weeks later and think should have made it that small here's the difference when I scale it back up again it doesn't lose any quality and as we'll see that's because the smart object is remembering its original size it's like it's wrapping this logo inside a protective container that allows me to scale it up and down without losing quality I'll show you exactly what I mean by that in a second now it's important note smart objects are not so smart that it changes the rules of the words I can't still can't scale it bigger than it originally wass because then the same thing will happen so please don't misunderstand like some people said why I mean a smart tough and I tried to double the size well that doesn't change you still can't do that all this means is if you scaled down you can scale back up to one hundred percent again now technically you're not scared two hundred percent you're eyeballing it to say that looks to me about one hundred percent but the main point of trying to make is don't assume that you can suddenly have the ability of scale any size you want because that is not the case work that way now there is an exception that will talk about tomorrow but that's only if you're bringing in a graphic it's in a vector format for something like illustrator then you may have that ability but for now this is what we're looking at so let's kind of try to explain what's happening here all right so I'm going to just do this so you can see what's happening all right so here's my little illustration of how smart objects work the first thing I would say to you is to me the best way to think of a smart object is you're putting that layer or layers into a container it's a special magical container that allows me to all kinds of things because it preserves the original photograph so here's what I mean inside I have taken this photograph and I said convert to smart object so for all intents and purposes now that photo is inside this special container if I decide that I want to make the container smaller than by nature the photo also gets smaller because inside that container but because of its special magical powers if I then later on decide but wait I still want to make that logo the original size I still can because that's what's inside that container so in that last example when I scaled that local up and down that's why that was ableto happen because the original size was still preserved inside that container when we talk about smart filter is a little bit later in this session what that means is I can apply a filter like say a blur filter to mike container and that means the contents will also blur but by the same token if I changed my mind later on the original non blurry photo is still inside that container so that's kind of my little nutshell summary of how smart objects work and you'll hear me throughout this lesson and every time I talk about smart objects used the term container and contents contents is a term you'll see in photoshopped container is not that's just my turn that would make sense to me to say put it inside a container and as we'll see tomorrow in the next session on this you can even put containers inside containers where it gets really fun but we're not going to jump the gun and talk about that to quickly so let's open up a file here now this is raw file so as we've seen before it starts in camera and this is one of the forms of smart objects that we talk about is it's saying got that open in photo shop s mart who talked about that quite a few times so that stays the same so if I do that by nature it's already a smart object so that's one of the other ways of creating a smart object is simply by opening a raw file with that convert to smart object already done as we saw earlier I could then do things like free transform and rotate and apply adjustment layers and do whatever I want knowing that I can always go back double click to come back to the original and make adjustments to my image if I so desire and then it will update whatever arrived on so that's fairly typical of the way smart objects work let's undo that a couple times now in the segment on adjusting images I showed you how you can use a command called new layer of I a copy if you want to separate smart obvious but let's say in this case I want to try something just a little layout of fat so I'm going to duplicate this smart object typical way of do cleaning command or control j is the shortcut for duplicate laywer in this case it also means duplicate smart object and I'm going to take this one and scale it down and let's just hit enter for now and then I want this to be a little smaller so I'm going to take a selection like this and adler mask free transform to rotate it and then let's add one of our layer styles like a stroke inside white some size and then just for good measure at a drop shadow over here like that okay so now I've got this little layout I've created most ideal in the world but it'll serve our purpose for now to show you that I've made two copies of the same smart object one of them I've applied the filter which will go into our the style I should say stroke and drop shadow and now I've done all this work and I've saved it as a psd and let me pause and say yet another time where saving as a psd is absolutely crucial because just like psd format preserves the layers it also preserves the smart objects that air within that layers panels well so very important so now I've done all this work and then I once again decide I want altar both photographs so I would go in and make some adjustment and let's just do some things you can clearly see that I'm making an obvious change we'll just go overboard here as you can see when I click okay it's gonna update both of them because they're two copies of the same smart object and that happened because I duplicated the same smart object to you get the result that I want so how could we take advantage of that duplicate smart object idea well here's an idea that I think is kind of interesting for a while in photo shop there was a command called picture package and went away for a while and then it came back and the whole idea is to say I want to create multiple images on one page like in the good old days where you get that school package and it was like two four by fives and a bunch of wallet size all that kind of stuff but even with the picture package command or automated man coming back to photo shop didn't change the fact that it wasn't very customizable so I thought I'd like to do it myself so I'm going to create a new document here and let's make it eight by ten and for now I'm going to keep it low resolution for the sake of time has but a little higher but normally I would put this at the size I wouldn't only use for printing now I want to add my first image so I'm gonna pick one and say okay this is the raw file that I want to work on so let's just check everything looks okay I'll hit open object and I'll just drag it in here to our layout and because of the difference in sizing it's probably going to be the wrong size well do my free transform communiqu control zero and scale it down the size that I want I want one right about that size and I hit enter now I want to create multiple versions of this just like I did in that last example I'm gonna use a little shortcut optional drag makes another one then I'll do that again greg it down with this case I want small and down here enter and all I'm doing is making multiple copies each time I'm option all dragging or rotate this one sideways and make it even smaller yet this now if this was a real project I would be much more careful about sizing everything and making sure the spacing was all correctly here I'm just trying to show you the basic idea and then I could add my logo which for now we're going to just say is that it's a logo he doesn't say you would put your actual logo name and dress all that kind of stuff and I'm going to save this as a psd file now one of the things that I love about smart objects is even though it's not a word of this way in photo shop is by doing what you just saw me do here I've done this once but now this is in effect a template it's not called a template there's not a place in photo shop where you say save his template but for all intents and purposes it is because I'm able to reuse this very easily thanks to a built in command of smart objects so let's just make sure I'm set up here for this to work I'm gonna look at one of my original camera raw files and it's saying that it's eighteen hundred is the long side at a resolution of two hundred okay good now just to make sure this one is the same size because this is kind of important doesn't have to be but it works best so this is the same size okay good all right so now back to our story here we've I've done all this work we've added our logo it looks fantastic we put a colored background or a texture or whatever we want and now we've printed this out hand given it to our first client we save it as a psd file now I want to create my next picture package instead of going to all the effort of repeating that operation this is one smart object with one two three four five six copies and because they're copies that means if I edit one of them like this they will all update okay but what's even equal washes even better it's equally interesting is that hole template concept works because of this one command I go to any one of my camera smart objects and I choose replace contents and so I say what do you want to replace it with and I'm gonna pick my different file and these are the same kind of size so it'll first opening camera I click okay and then it goes through and it says let me replace all those other ones for you so you see it to set them all in one shot so now I would take this one printed and or save it but I'm always saving a layered version because even though it's not called this by nature the fact that these air smart objects one of the options is replace contents and you'll see other examples of this as we go throughout today and tomorrow but I want to stress the fact that this works well when the images are if not identical very close to the same size and there's a little a little trick that you have to do to make sure that even though they might appear to be the same size they have to be warded the same way in photo shop and what I mean by that is when we talked before about resolution I said the pixel dimensions the important thing resolution doesn't matter here is where it would in camera raw even if both of these images said eighteen hundred pixels if one said two hundred and one said three hundred then as faras cameras concerned they're not the same size and that when you did that replace contest thing it wouldn't work properly so we need to be very specific about making sure this is the same size so what I would recommend is if you're creating a template like this template in quotation marks than the first time I picked a typical size that you take your raw files or you're j pay files and use that as your starting size so then everything else will be the same size sorry fly just came buzzing right through my studio here that didn't get it okay so that's an example of replace contents good let's I want to show you one that would be kind of you to sit up and take those in a while that's kind of cool but let's take it even go back a step and do even amore typical situation so here's something that I do quite often when I want to print on my own inkjet printer I wanna have a white border around the outside with my name across the bottom I might take that and just make it a little less obvious now this is a camera smart obvious so all I did to get to this point is what you just saw basically opened a camera raw smart object and dragged drag it it drugged it moved it into this area so now it's a position where I want and I could again on top of this decide I want for example a little stroke here inside just to make it look a little better and later on we'll talk more specifically about smart filters but for now let's just say I want to sharpen this for printing so I'm just gonna pick some numbers for now we will talk more about that shortly now at this point I would save this file and then print it but once again because it is a smart object it also means that has that kind of template ability built into it so now it's time to print my next print so I have to do is in my camera smart vic choose replaced contents then I go on find the other photo that I have in a year that is this one and I a place it still goes into camera off first so I have the ability to go in and make my last tweaks if I haven't already done that click okay and then it goes in and replace this now you can see this one was a slightly different size so it's a little different but that's okay I can still scaled up just a little bit if I want to but it's still when you compared to the alternative of me having to do this from scratch every time this is a lot easier towards the end of our thirty days we'll talk about automation and one of those topics will be actions so you could create an action to do this but this to me is almost easier because just a folly after open you have to record anything it just happens automatically now at the beginning of this lesson I talked about the downsides to smart object so let's look att that vory brutus I have this one open the first one I'm not going there's no point in showing you just again mentioned that my file sizes bigger that's a bit of a problem I wish it wasn't the case but it is but I can live with that but the thing that usually throws people off is for example let's say I see a speck of dust to hear that I didn't notice and I go to my spot healing brush and also I got this symbol which is telling me you can't do that I can't use the spot healing brush directly on here and if I try to it says this smart object must be rast arised before proceeding edit contents will no longer be available and it's prompting me do you want to rasa rise a smart object and it's actually scarily this frightens me a whole lot it's prompted me to click okay rast arise is that term that means take away smartness takeaway edit ability and I don't want that so any time you see a warning dialog box says you'll have to rast arise this avoided at all costs unless you can figure out a way around it which frankly there aren't too many then don't do this so I wish there was another button that said no thank you very much all use another man but that's really what canceled meets so it's telling me well you can't do that because smart objects not directly edible okay thank you for pointing that out now that I know that so how do I do it well when we talk more about retouching later on this is the way I do it anyway I would add a new layer and then take my spot healing brush and I just make sure that sample all layers is turned on and now if I do something in here I'm sure what this will do it may or may not work but we'll see okay not so much but this is for purpose of demonstration okay that's really not very good but anyway the point is the healing has been done on the separate layer so when people view that as a drawback of using smart objects is they're not directly editable to me that's kind of the point is they're not directly editable which eh preserves the ability for me to change my mind and be just means I would do this retouching a reading where normally would on a separate layer there's very few tools in photoshopped that don't have this functionality and they include things like the dodgers burn tools but as we saw earlier I don't really use the dodge in bern tools as much as I would an adjustment layer anyway so that's just to kind of get out of the way the fact that for some people their concern is that using smart objects means I can edit it but there are ways around as you saw here so this concept of replace contents means in this case all I do is choose a different photograph it automatically put it in its sized it and put the board around the outside and reapplied the filter ready to print so instead of me having do that every time this cut to the chase and did it for me now what happens if you have a whole bunch of layers in a document this one has a whole bunch of shapes and a whole bunch of type players because frankly it was just easier to do that because I wanted to be able to size all these layers the same way well the only drawback to that is now my layers panel is getting kind of complicated looking because I have all these different things going on so if I said I went to the top of my layers panel said show me just the type players now here they all are and one of the options that I could do and we'll talk more about turning type into smart objects in a second is convert to a smart object and then turn off that filter now when you first glance of that that looks like I've emerged the layers but I really haven't all I've done is converted them into a smart objects I've taken all those independent type players and I've put them all into my protective container so what this does is it means the clutter of my layers panel has now been cleaned up a little bit it's easier for me to see what I want to do I could move them all as one as we'll see shortly I can now apply filters and things but people's concern is but I thought you said you want to be able to always edit your type well yes I do and the way I do it and this is the way we always working with smart objects is I have to look inside that container to get to my contents in the first scenario I had a camera raw smart object so I double clicked on the container the contents were in camera raw in this case when I double click on the container the contents open in a separate window and here's all my type players so I still have access all the type players it's just in a separate window and this is the part that lot of people find it hard to get used to and might find it somewhat inconvenient and at first it is a little different and perhaps it slows you down a bit but it's another one of those things where it's a tradeoff separate window versus a higher level of edit ability than we had before and I'll show example in just one second about what I mean by that but any time you have a smart object that didn't start in camera raw when you double click is gonna open the contents in a separate window so now I have two windows this is my working document where I've got the text in place and doing all those things and now if I decide I want to change maybe the color of one type player I just have to go and find it and pick a different color than I commit the type and all I do is close this document let's try that again close this document and save the changes and when I do you see it instantly updates so you're making changes in that separate contents window and saving it toe update inside the container and that's the part that for at first for many people it takes a little bit more time get used because it's different but what it means is it's giving us opportunities to do things in a way we couldn't before so here's another example of what I mean by that it's just temporarily hide all these other layers and I'll just add some type on here and we're gonna make it nice and big so we can see it and let's say that I now want to add some texture to this to this type player well on the ways we can do that is with all these filters well there is a bunch of filters there's one in here in the filter gallery oh wait oh this type player must be restaurant before proceeding it's text will no longer be editable rast arise the type once again is prompting me to click okay I'm gonna go no thank you I wish this dialog box had this text was all like flashing and red because a lot of people when they see dollar busted okay and they click okay and then what happens is yes I can apply the filter but now it's no longer text and I want the best of both worlds are going to undo that and instead I'm goingto convert this to a smart object now you'll notice one difference here I could still do it this way convert to smart object now I also have this command called convert for smart filters which religious means all converted for smart filters by making into a smart objects the same thing exactly but now when you look at the thumbnail it looks like it's been rast arised but it has that very important little symbol on it so now I can go filter gallery find the effect that I want and we'll just go with that inflict okay but the difference is now two important things have happened first of all the filter shows up here in my layers panel and secondly this is still editable type so let's deal with this part first if I decide now every looks great but I wish I has a different typeface I double click it opens my original type player so now I can do something else like use lower case letters for the sake of argument closed and say this and now updates so we still have access to our touch which is very very important because I want that I don't want to have to give up the ability edit my type simply to apply a filter once I have applied the filter now I have a whole bunch of things that I could do with that filter I can turn it off completely to say hide it's still there but like other layer functions that'll eyeball means visibility or and as I often make myself say this should all be and or and or I could double click on this to say well that's what I had before instead I wish it looked more like this with some other setting and I'll just do something really obvious so you can see that I've made a change click okay and now updates and I can also decide maybe I want to change the blending options of the filter so this is basically when we talked about blend modes in layers this is the equivalent as if I had put the filter on a layer by itself somehow which you can't really do but this is the equivalent and changed the blend mode or the opacity toe let the original layer show through so in this case the original layer was our type if I lower the opacity I'm lauren the opacity off the filter so the original layer is more visible or I could also change the blend mode off that filter to make it display differently and finally this white box here is a mass just like we have layer mask this is a smart filter mask and like a regular mask and layers if there's some area you don't want to show you paint with black so the exact same theory applies here the reason the filter is showing the way it is because by default the filter mask is white so if there's an area of this where I don't want that filter to apply and this is not hiding the text this is hiding the filter on the text so I've got blackest my form color hundred capacity okay and now as I go through and start to mask you'll see I'm hiding the effects of the filter from certain areas let me do the same thing on the background layers you can see even more clearly if I take this background and convert to a smart object and let's do a really over the top thing like a motion blurs you can really see that I've done something crazy I click okay and now we strolled out of the bottom you see it's saying well has a smart filter called motion blur I can turn on and off I can double click to say maybe that wasn't the best angle in the world I want oh that's much better look okay I could adjust the settings at any time and if I over to the side here I couldn't do the blend options to say I want to lower the capacity to get a different effect and it pours like I also take my paintbrush make a really big brush for example and just sort of paint on the mast to say I don't really want it to be quite a cz blurry in this area here and because it's a mask we always have the ability to turn it on and off with the shift key or continue to adjust it so this is what smart filters do is it changes the rules of filters what I used to see all the time and I used to do the same thing is you would have to have some workaround for example duplicate the background layer and apply the motion blur to the background copy so at least you had a back up plan to be able to well delete it or lower the opacity although it didn't do is let me change my mind and say I want to set a different motion blur the other great benefit of this and it's something I think people overlook is all the time I hear people say I was playing around photo shop and I did something that I absolutely loved but when I went back to try to figure out how I did it I have no idea because all I saw was some layers and I didn't really remember how I did because I just tried so many things if you smart filters and you cant member you looking so how'd I do that well it will tell you it will say you did a motion blur of this much on this angle and you apply to mass to it so it's almost like it's almost like it is an ability to almost deconstruct and figure out what you did because it's built into the document as long as say it with me you save is a psd because that's part of the deal here so this is one of the great advantages of smart filters is that they're very editable at any time and it also means we could do things we couldn't do before such as apply of filter to our type now it is also possible let me clear out this mask when you have are working with smart filters you can do more than one filter on the same layer so let's do a blur x that we won't do it anywhere near us much in this case something like that and this is one of the only drawbacks too smart filters that unfortunately is the reality even though I've added too smart filters motion blur and filter gallery the texturizing kind of thing that I could turn on and off there's on ly one mask so if I take my paintbrush once again and decide I wantto hide the motion blur but I'm also hiding the filter gallery and there's no easy way around that well talk in it kind of part two tomorrow about away that we at least try to accommodate for that but frankly it's it's quite a bit of effort to get to this point so smart filters really really interesting possibility now let's go back here and let's see which one should I use doesn't really matter I suppose well let's use this one again what I want to show you at this point is the fact that it is possible to copy a smart filter from one image to another it just takes a little bit of a twist that isn't perhaps obvious at first so because this is a camera smart object is already ready for smart filters so we'll do gazi in blur and I'm gonna really blur the heck out of this and then on the mask I'm going to take again a fairly large paintbrush and just kind of say but don't blur this much I'm trying to get this kind of soft dreamy effect so we'll lower the opacity all right lower the opacity just a little bit too great this kind of soft focus effect now I decide I'm working on another photo and I want the same look so instead of me having to worry about what settings that I use and everything else by looking at this I am just going to copy this smart filter onto the other image and the only kind of trick to this is you cannot copy just the smart filter so what I have to do initially is take this entire image the whole smart object with the smart filter attached and drag it over to the other document once I've done that then I can take this smart filter and drag it onto this image and then delete the top now if I trolled us down there's the same gaussian blur and I can tweak the settings in this case what I probably do is fill the mask with white and then teo different painting on the mass for this particular photo something like that so that's kind of our little trick that's involved if you want to say well I really want to take a the same smart filter and use it over again you have to copy the entire smart object if you copy it into a document that isn't currently smart you would have to convert that layer to a smart object then you could drag the filter over again so that's one the other little tricks in the world of smart objects and smart filters so almost every filter there's very few in photo shop very few filters that cannot be used as a smart object and see almost all of them are available a couple are grayed out and there is even an interesting little hidden feature let's throw this away for a moment when I was talking in an earlier lesson about making adjustments I didn't really touch on this one and I even told you kind of shy away from everything under the image adjustment menu here's one exception shadows highlights I would use but only if I first convert my photo to a smart object and or if it's a camera smart object because it's a little bit tricky but even though it's under the adjustment menu technically shadows highlights is a filter so that means I could apply some adjustment here whatever I want let's just go with the fewer options just wait at the bottom here that's just it's not that I really like that but it was trying to show you something and click okay and you'll see now shadows highlights appears here so a lot of people over time I have said I really like shadows and highlights I wish it was an adjustment layer well it isn't but this is the next closest thing because it can be applied as a smart filter so that's one of the few exceptions where I'll ever hear me say you something under this menu otherwise it's probably not a great idea so the question that comes up often for people is well should I always use smart objects and like anything else global terms like always and never and everything else it's more of a personal decision but frankly my reaction is I would always consider it if there's some reason why you just think just don't buy this filter and that's they don't do anything else that's okay but I would at least consider the possibility of wood it makes sense to make a smart filter first usually to me it does because it has lots of advantages and very few disadvantages it has the advantage of being able for me to do it to things like type players which I previously couldn't it allows me to edit it and I could go back and see how I did it months down the road those two mea reason alone to consider using smart filters because of the nature of how it works just its built in to the document I'm already saving is a psd so why wouldn't I want to have the filter already available to me okay let's look att one other example here so here's another example of a document that I had saved previously this layer was converted had to be converted teo rast arise in this case sorry because of the nature of where it came from that's a different kind of a story but everything else in here is this regular layers except these three photographs are the same one photograph three times and what I did is they're all cameras smart objects the first one is in overlay excuse me in the lower opacity I could also try changing the blend mode to overlay maybe I like the way that looks I don't know and I could also apply a filter like r gazi and blur I do this a lox I really like this effect I think it's really interesting is to deliberately over blur and then lower the opacity down so we get that nice kind of soft focus effect when you combine that into something with a command like overly that's kind of a neat background so I'm previously brought in this is just a a photo I took a close up of some water and the two of them kind of combined together that I took that camera smart object and I duplicated twice each one has a layer mask because they want the whole thing to be visible and each one has a little border that I painted on after the fact so I say this is a psd file so that I could take this one and printed but also for the same concept as we saw before by double click on any one of these I can find out the information okay so this is important fifteen forty two at two forty so now just to make sure I have a better chance of success let's take this one again and put being forty two to forty okay done now you might be asked yourself why didn't you just open it all I was doing there was making sure the sizing matched up so in the next step when I choose replace contents photoshopped will do the work for me so I just have to go to any one of these it's all copies of exactly the same thing and I choose replace contents then I have to just go and find the one I want hit place it's still opens in camera off first so technically I could have changed the size at this point but I just want to make sure I had a correct while I remember the numbers but I could have done that at this point and I just whatever else I want okay and then it comes in now everything's not in a perfect position but I like to do is unlinked my mass and say on this one I'll show this part and on this layer go like this this bottom one position her better like that so there's another example of where you do some of the work up front by creating this kind of layout and saving as a template template and quotations remember because it doesn't don't go looking for a command called template photoshopping by nature of saving as a psd this will automatically happen and as long as you structure it with things like laywer masks and things of that nature that has you saw it's very easy to tweet the results maybe in this case I look at and I say well I like everything's have been not convinced in this case there's overlay mold works so I just change it back to normal because well I can because that's just another layer function so that's the kind of approach that we're going to take when we're exploring how did I do something with smart objects is I'm always thinking this way of creating something that's very editable and re usable the thing that like I said before tends to kind of throw people a little bit for a loop is when they're doing something like this when I showed you before I had multiple layers and I converted them to a smart object by selecting them all that means in effect I put them all those layers into one container and especially when you have multiple documents open in order to edit this type the fact we have to double click and open a separate window that's just something you have to get used to now if let's close this down and show you want things you could do this will work best if I on ly have my one window opens on the clothes everything else so now I have my working document and I'm going to turn on the other layers that I have in here to show you all of them that's going on and now I decide first of all let's take off that weird motion blur okay so now I decided let's delete this sari with you in one second here we go so now I decide I want to edit my types when I double click it opens that separate window but the fact that it's separate for some people is a little bit confusing because if to make a change here I have to save it and switch back again so in an earlier class I talked about this thing called style well here's another example where I might use this tile it so on one side I have my contents on this side I have the working version with everything in context to my background so now what this means instead of having to what we switching back and forth and windows I'm kind of seeing them both at the same time so for example I could take my text tool and decide I want this to be uh heavier font size and a completely different color and as soon as I commit the type and had saved you'll see it updates instantly so for many people even though it might seem more confusion the towel the windows that helps you kind of get past the fact that weight its contents and container and back and forth this is just a simpler way I think it's simpler in the long run to get used to it I don't necessarily do this all the time sometimes I just get in the habit of switching between documents but for them for the time being and say this is a good way to kind of get the grasp of how that how this works create several layers and then put them in a smart object double clicked open it and then tile the two windows so you see here's my finished document and you'll be reminded if I try to do anything I can't edit this might try and take the type tool I cannot edit this I have to go to this document where aiken either edit something or hide it save and it updates changed my mind it's saved it updates so if you in in bed in your mind container and contents that's half the battle and it does take some getting used to now no lying here this is different this is a different approach I know lots of people who've used photo shop for years and they don't work this way because as I've said many times we tend to be creatures of habit and that's fine it's fine doing things the way you're comfortable with but if we're really aiming to do things in the most flexible efficient creative way that's what I love about smart objects I can go down some path and try filters and adjustment layers and all these things and do fifteen operations and then kind of go I wish back at step two I hadn't done that filter so strongly in the old days before smart objects I would have gone well and either have to start over again or undo a bunch of times or whatever now I just go back to when I did that smart filter look at the settings maybe hide it or alter the settings because again it's just part of the structure of the document now in the next part tomorrow we're going to take things up a notch and see how you can start to make even more interesting of these templates and also how we can take full advantage of smart filters even mohr and will even start stretching your mind a little bit by saying what if we want to put a smart object inside a smart object put that inside a smart object it might sound really confusing right now but when you look through the logic of it you'll see it actually does make sense and not something you do every day but when have you run into that roadblock of we're in the past used to say oh well I guess I'll do that now you think oh maybe I'll make a smart object and that will help me solve the problem so no assignment today unless you feel you want explore a little bit of doing some smart filters but watch tomorrow's class and you'll see a bunch more examples of smart option smartphones and he'll be ready to roll with the wonderful world of smart objects and smart filters will see you
Class Materials
Ratings and Reviews
Melinda Wong
Very good teaching. I really liked how clear Dave was with everything, the order he taught the material, and I thought the stories were very helpful. I REALLY wanted to understand photoshop and extremely thankful for his wisdom and knowledge. Thank you so much! This is what was holding me back from getting my photography started! :) It just seemed so intimidating and now I have a greater understanding.
a Creativelive Student
I'm a beginner and have found that the information Dave gives is great, although a little to fast at times. I'd like to buy the course but am curious. If I purchase can I watch it and pause it and rewind it? That would be extremely important to me. Thanks for a great service CreativeLive...
a Creativelive Student
Lots of information! Initially I thought I'd just watch the free version as I already have several Creativelive videos on Photoshop but I really like how the classes are broken into subjects and shorter, 1 hour sessions-it will make reviewing much easier! I love Dave's teaching style-he covers everything very well. (Plus the fact that he's Canadian, eh?) :D Thanks for offering such a great course! I'd would love to see Dave do a similar one on Illustrator.