How to Be Smart and Learn the Great Advantages of Using Photoshop Smart Objects

Using Smart Objects is one of the techniques that you should know if you're a common user of Photoshop, or even if you're using Photoshop to do the basic day to day stuff. By the end of this tutorial you will know more about smart objects, when and why you should use them!

First what is the term "smart object" means? Simply, it's a smart why to use, edit and manipulate objects in Photoshop.

Consider smart objects as a file within a file, or a file within a layer in Photoshop that holds all information like Pixels, colors, positioning and characteristics for that object, so when you do edit the objects Photoshop change it without changing these main characteristics for this object. If you want to understand more in depth: smart objects take advantage of the vector graphics way to modulate these objects. Smart objects uses vector information to keep graphics crisp specially while resizing.

How to create smart objects?

On "Picture 1" there is two layers, Apple-1 and Apple-2, to make Apple-2 layer a smart object Right click on the layer and hit convert to smart object, or go to Layers > Smart objects > convert to smart object.

After converting any layer to a smart object the layer will be marked with a small icon to differentiate between regular layers and smart object layers.

What's the difference between Smart objects and the not too smart objects?

After converting one of the layers to a smart object we have two kind of layers, the regular layer and a smart one. To realize what the difference is let's do a simple test:

- First step: I'll make the apple on the smart layer really small. Then I'll make the same thing for the other apple on the regular apple. (See Picture 3-1)

- After resizing, say that we decided we don't need them that small and we need to scale them back to larger again.

The bad news is if one of these layers were not a smart objects it will lose its sharpness and crispness, (See Picture 3-2) but on the other hand smart objects are smart, so our smart apple went back to normal exactly the way it was before scaling by retaining all the date and characteristic for this image.

One huge advantage of smart object: Applying changes to all smart objects copies once you do any change to one of them.

To prove that let's try a cool thing together: let's duplicate the last smart object to create a new smart object

- Now I want to take a bite from this apple. To edit we need to double click the smart objects or go to Layers > Smart Object > edit contents. New window with the content of this layer will pop-up. On the new window I'll cut a piece from the apple.

- After applying the edit to the smart object close it and save. Once you close it the change applies to all of the copies of that smart object on your PSD.

Because our smart objects are both linked to the original file when you do a change to any of them it applies to all the other copies. This proves the fact that smart object is a file within a file or file Linked to your PSD design. Thinks how much time you can save if you use smart object instead of the regular layers... on our design we had only two layers, but think of the huge difference if we have 20 layer and we need to change something on all of them!!

Smart objects are one of the great ways to covert your object for updating and editing no matter what you're dealing with either vector or non vector objects/files. I'm sure by know you realized the huge difference between smart and non smart objects, when and where you can use them, and how easy can you resize, edit and build designs on a professional non destructive way by using smart objects.

Hope you learn something while enjoying this cool tutorial.