What You Need to Know About Smart Objects in Photoshop

Photography Tips

Photoshop is such an extensive and massive editing tool it can take years to master it and learn how to harness it’s full image editing prowess. In this 30-minute tutorial, however, you can learn all about Smart Objects as the video highlights ten interesting aspects of the tool that are essential to using it:

Smart Object Essentials

One thing to know about Smart Objects is how useful they can be if you will be resizing objects. In the image below, you can see the difference between an object that has been converted to a Smart Object and one that has not. Once scaled down, back up again and you can see how the Smart Object maintained its resolution, whereas the other became highly pixelated and unusable.

Without using Smart Objects you risk losing image quality.

Smart Objects should be made before you resize your layers so that maximum image quality will be maintained throughout the entire project. This is also true when you are working with Masks.

Smart Objects for Composite Photography

Another useful thing to know is how easy replacing an object can be when using Smart Objects. This is especially useful when working with composite images.

Smart Objects also make replacing content very simple.

All you have to do is right-click the Smart Object in the Layer panel and select Replace Content. A file browser appears where you can navigate to the image file you wish to use to replace the original content and open it. Photoshop will automatically swap the old for the new, leaving you with just some easy resizing to do.

Learning Photoshop is an intensive experience. Be sure to watch the video for even more tips on how you can use Smart Objects to ease and expedite your Photoshop workflow.