Adobe Photoshop CS5 Tutorials
Working with Layers / PSD Smart Objects in CS5
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS5 / Working with Layers / PSD Smart Objects in CS5)
OK, now, this next item that I want to show you, I'm really actually, I'm really excited to show you this because I think this is arguably my most favorite new feature inside CS5, Photoshop CS5 that is. Do you know what Smart Objects are? I use Smart Objects all the time, particularly between Illustrator and Photoshop but also sometimes between Photoshop and Dreamweaver. That's something that came around in CS4. Well, now what we have are Photoshop Smart Objects. Now, if you don't know what that is really, I think it'll make a heck of a lot more sense when I actually show you this but probably the short and sweet I guess you could say is imagine having a Photoshop file inside another Photoshop file. So here's what I'm going to do here. We have our statue composite image that we're working on. We have our layers there, the stripe, the statue, the clouds, it's all good. I'm going to flip over to my Finder Window, at least here on the Mac and I'm looking at my Project Files Folder. Now, if you're on the Windows side, make sure to open up a new Explorer Window, a new Folder Window and navigate towards your Project Files Folder and inside your Project Files Folder you'll find a file, I've get them selected here, Text.psd. So .PSD. He's a Photoshop document or he's a native Photoshop file. Essentially what I want to do is I want to add this file into our statue composite. So you're going to need to arrange your screen sort of like I have my screen arranged. I have Photoshop in the background. I can see my statue but then on top of that I have my Project Files Folder open and I have the Text.psd file selected. Getting this to actually work is a little bit weird but kind of follow me on the magical mystery tour. Essentially what I want to do is I want to add Text.psd to the layout that you and I are working on inside Photoshop. So again, it's going to be a Photoshop file inside another Photoshop file. That's the whole idea here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take Text.psd, fasten your seatbelts here. What I'm going to do is drag this guy into my statue image window down inside Photoshop, drag and drop him in there and you get this. Now, what we see here and I hope this worked for you, is the contents of Text.psd. OK, let me zoom in just a little bit here on my file. Now, we get a little bit of text in here, place your text here, May 17, 2010 and so on. We get a large, gray rectangle and then the entire structure of this object is enclosed, if you will, inside this frame and this frame looks almost like the Free Transform Frame, doesn't it? And by the way, it functions in exactly the same way as well. I could scale this object or rotate it around or whatever. I think in my case here all I'm going to do is I'm just going to reposition him down towards the bottom of my layout, something like this I think is fine and then I'll just hit Enter to lock that in. Alright, we're looking good here. Now, have a look over at your Layers Palette and what you should find is at the top of your Layers Palette you should have a new layer called Text. So in other words, it created a new layer based off of the file name that you and I just dragged in, right; Text.psd. Make sure this guy's at the top of your Layers Palette by the way as well. Now, this is the cool part. This is the part that I want to show you. This little icon here in the bottom right corner of the layer thumbnail indicates that we have a Smart Object. Now, what the heck is this thing called a Smart Object? Well, again, it's a file inside another fileright? In our case it's a .psd file inside another Photoshop File. Now, what I want to do though is I want to edit this Smart Object so check this out. I'm going to double click on this little Smart Object Icon over inside the Layers Palette and I'm presented with this really cryptic dialog box. It reads here After editing the contents, choose File Save to commit your changes. Those changes will be reflected upon returning to Statue.jpg or whatever file you're currently working on. The file must be saved to the same location. If the Save As Dialog Box appears, choose Cancel and flatten he image before saving. And that's really kind of weird and cryptic. It doesn't really tell us exactly what's going to happen here so let's reluctantly click on OK and see what happens here. Alright. Now, this is the cool part. I'm brought into Text.psd. So in other words, it just opened up Text.psd. Well, actually not exactly. Not precisely. It's actually opened up a temporary file based off of Text.psd. But as you can see, over inside the Layers Palette, I now have three text layers and a gray background layer so I have a layer for St. Peter's Hall, I have a layer for the date there, May 17, 2010 and I have a layer called Place Your Text. So all of these text layers here and you can tell that they're text layers because the T Icon there all correspond with what we see down inside the image window. So what I want to do here with you and I hope this is making sense and if it's not, hang in there and it'll make sense as we go along here. What I want to do is I just want to set up a couple of simple changes here. I want to change the text here from Place your text to the actual name of the event. Again, maybe this is going to wind up being a poster for some kind of an event or a charity meeting or something like this. So I'm going to hit the T Key on my keyboard and what that does is that flips me over to the Text Tool inside my Toolbox and what I'll do is I'll click and drag over top of this text here to change it and by the way, as a quick aside, you may not be seeing the same font that I have here. You might not have the same font installed on your computer in any regard, I'm going to type in the name of my event which is Medieval Dinner, there we go, something like that. I'll go back to my Move Tool inside the Toolbox and by the way, here's a neat little trick. I'm on my Move Tool and you can see that the right edge of the Medieval Dinner isn't lining up with the St. Peter's Hall or the date there so with my Move Tool activated, I just tap my Left Arrow Key on my keyboard, actually nudge this object around, which is kind of cool. So in other words, what you can do is you can select a layer inside your Layers Palette there and then use your Arrow Keys on your keyboard to nudge that object around so long as you're on the Move Tool. OK, cool. I think we're looking good here. I'm going to turn off the visibility of the background layer as well, that nasty gray background. Let's save our file, Command S or Control S on the Windows side. Let's close the file, Command W or Control W again on the Windows side, back to our statue layout and there's our changes inside Photoshop. So now we can move the Smart Object wherever we want. Again, we can nudge it if we want using our Arrow Keys and it's all about this Smart Object here inside our Layers Palette. So all the stuff that we see here, the text here and if we had that background layer and so on, that's all compiled, if you will, inside this Smart Object inside our Layers Palette. So again, it's kind of like having a file inside a file. It's extremely cool and I can think of about a billion applications of where I could use this in my own work. That's why I think it's one of my favorite new features inside Photoshop CS5. So I hope you'll like it.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS5 |
| Author: | Geoff Blake |
| SKU: | 34150 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-46-1 |
| Release Date: | 2010-08-06 |
| Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 95 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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