What are Photoshop smart objects and how can they help your photo editing?

 

 

Colin Smith of Photoshop Cafe has a new video focused on using smart objects in Photoshop. What are smart objects and how can they help your photo editing?

To help illustrate what a smart object is and what it does, Smith uses an example of a potato. Suppose you want to make the potato blue, you can paint the potato. Now, suppose you then decide you don't want the potato to be blue, it will be very difficult to remove the blue paint. However, if you place the potato in a bag and apply your paint to the plastic around the potato, you could always just get rid of that painted layer later. It's similar to editing a photo. If you apply everything to the photo layer itself, the background layer in Photoshop, then every adjustment gets stacked on one another, making it impossible to undo any specific step in your photo editing process. This is where smart objects come into play. Imagine now that the potato is your photograph's pixels and the plastic bag is a smart object, you want to be making adjustments to the plastic bag rather than the potato.

Ultimately, flexibility is where smart objects shine. It's not uncommon to go through an image edit only to decide later that you no longer want a specific edit applied to your image. If you apply edits to smart objects instead of on your photograph itself, they can always be adjusted or removed later without disrupting the rest of the work you have done. Smith shows us how to utilize, adjust and take advantage of smart objects in the video below.

(Via Photoshop Cafe)