How To Master Using Smart Objects In Photoshop

On this video tutorial Aaron Nace from Phlearn talks about smart objects, smart filters and linked objects in Photoshop.

This tutorial is less about photography and retouching and more about some of the more advanced Photoshop functionality. However learning these skills might help you with future projects and it is just another aspect of Photoshop which is worth knowing about.

Nace start with a smart object – smart objects are able to retain the original size of the image. If you don’t convert to a smart object, pixels will be lost when scaling up and down (you can see this in the example Nace shows in the video. To create a smart object, right click on the layer and select “Convert to Smart Object.”

Next we look at smart filter – Once you have a layer that turned into a smart object, you can work with smart filters. This means that any filter or effect you apply to a smart object will automatically become a ‘smart filter.’ You will see it stacked under the layer, and can go into it and edit it. You can also turn the effect on and off, and even change the blending mode easily.

Finally Nace looks at Linked Objects – If a change is made on the original document, it will be applied to all of the linked documents when saved – so cool and something that can be very useful when working on large projects.

You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section (and you can find a lot more Phlearn videos on our special Phlearn subsection).

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.