A long overdue tool in Photoshop is Smart Objects. Smart Objects function a lot like groups in that they let you combine multiple layers and help you stay organized in your document. The biggest advantage to Smart Objects is that pixel data AND vector shapes you store in a Smart Object are perfectly preserved letting you resize and manipulate without affecting the original image data. This is incredibly handy for Photoshop pieces where you have photos that you are constantly resizing up and down to fit. It also means that you can embed complex vector assets directly from Illustrator.
Another nice advantage to Smart Objects is that they read the composite image data of the layers they are storing. This also conveniently moves a lot of layers out of your document, which is great if your layers palette is started to get cluttered. If you have a photograph with a lot of adjustment layers that is bogging down your machine, you can convert all of the layers to a Smart Object and increase your performance drastically.
Note: While you can apply layer styles to a smart object, it doesn’t use the smart objects alpha channel. This means layer styles like drop shadow and stroke will look weird because it will apply the layer style to the outside edge only and not composite it like it would a normal layer.
Creating a Smart Object
Creating a smart object is easy. Just select the layers you want to group using shift in the layers palette. Then right click and select ‘Convert to Smart Object’.
To create a vector smart object, just copy the vector shapes you want in Illustrator then paste them in Photoshop. Be sure to select ‘Smart Object’ from the paste options menu that pops up.
Creating a Smart Object in Photoshop
Copy/pasting in a vector image, be sure to use ths smart object option
A vector smart object. Notice that the transform box is different than normal, this indicates that this layer is a smart object. The transform box is the same for pixel smart objects too.
Editing Smart Objects
To edit a Smart Object, just double click on the layer. If it is a pixel based image, it will open up a new Photoshop document with the smart layers in it. If the smart layer is vector based it will open up the vector data in Illustrator. When it opens the new document it’s only a temporary file in memory so be sure to save it before you close it. Saving this temporary document doesn’t create a new file, it just saves the modified information into the original document that contains the Smart Object.
I have to admit, I just found out about smart objects a few weeks ago. Now I use them all of the time! It’s amazing how fast they can help clean up the work flow of a document. I definitely prefer using smart objects instead of using groups.
Another aspect of smart objects is that if you make a copy of an object and then edit the copy the changes made will appear on both layers (original and copy). If you wanted to be able to edit the copy independently I’m pretty sure you just have to make it into a new smart object. There’s probably another way to do it, but that’s all that I know.
I’ve started using smart objects for everything too, mostly because I’m doing a lot of heavy Photoshop work which slows everything down.
Also, thanks for bringing up the point about editing multiple copies of smart objects, I neglected to mention it in the article.
Good article Jerrol. It’s a bit of a shame for the F/OSS lover in me that GIMP doesn’t have anything like this and seems to spend its time trying to catch up to PS, rather than being an independent and intelligent program… maybe something exciting will happen in the next couple of versions.
This must be for a newer version of Photoshop. I have CS (version 8).
Doug,
Indeed, it is new with CS2. Sorry!
Thanks for the explanation. Undesrtanding S.Objects more, makes me bother transferring vectors in from Illustrator, rather than converting things to custom shapes and all types of other ways I had invented to get true vectors into PS
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