Photoshop Basic 2 - The Complete Smart Object Workflow

1. Smart Object Workflow's Overview: this image represents a typical image with the type of work that I dio that has difficulties where the subject is too dark, the background is too light and the colors are kind of non existent. So I end up having to do a lot of work very quickly, and then if the client chooses it, then I have to go back and do more work in photo shop. But this is just going to give you an idea of what I have to do from the very beginning of my workflow. And as I take it through the rest of the smart object process, all of the work that I do begins in late room. You don't have to use light room, but you will quickly see that benefited doing it in here as opposed to another raw processor. The only product they can give you similar results to light room is going to be adobes. Camera raw camera raw is meant to be one image at a time. Generally speaking, where's light room allows you to do batch corrections, since I'm often working with hundreds and thousands of images at a time, working in light room is if a huge benefit. I'm not gonna go in the light room in any level of detail, but this is how I start my work. When I begin in light room, I'm often trying to go as quickly as I can because I'm dealing with those hundreds and thousands of images. I really don't have a lot of time to be playing around so very quickly when I look at this , um, his shadows or too dark, so I'll open those up, the blacks then get washed out. So I put the contrast back into those blacks and the background is blown out. So I'll grab the highlights and bring them down. And for a very quick baseline, this is a decent place to start. I might do a little saturation, but that I'm moving on to the next image. But let's say that for whatever reason, this image was selected to be used by the client, and they want me to do more extensive retouching. So then I'll go in a light room, I'll find the image, and then I'll right click on it and then go down to edit in. Now, whenever I watch my students doing light room they always go to edit in Adobe Photo Shop CC . However, there is a huge problem when I actually do that. When I click on that option, when you look at the layers, you could see what the actual problem is. It brings it in as a background layer, meaning that whatever changes happen to have been made instead of light room, that's it. Any changes that I do at this point have to be starting at this point going forward. And to me, there's a big difference between the work that I did perhaps a week ago in light room and the work that I'm doing today in photo shop. So what that ultimately means is I want to use the tools that are available in set a light room. However, I don't want to use the light room interface to do it. Now I can. There's no reason I can't, but what I often find is there's a big difference between the light room interface and the photo shop interface, primarily in photo shop. I use this light gray background because this represents a more neutral tonal point, whereas if I go back in the light room, you can see that it has this really dark interface myself. And many others don't like this dark interface because it skews your perspective. You aren't seeing a baseline of tone. You're seeing darks and lights and mid tones, and things aren't as simple visually as they could be. So the bottom line is this. I often find that what I see in light room isn't necessarily the way that I see it inside of Adobe Photo Shop. So while I can make my changes here, I just prefer to do it inside a photo shop. However, instead of right clicking, going at it in at it in Adobe Photo Shop, if you go down and use open as smart object and photo shop, this changes everything because now we no longer have a pixel based raster image. What you see here is a pixel based raster image. But inside of this smart object designated by this funny icon, you'll see that we have complete access toe all of the raw detail simply by double clicking on the thumbnail. Now, if you notice here on the right hand side, it brought in all of those settings that I did write darken the highlights light in the shadows and dark in the blacks. In fact, any of the settings inside of light room get passed along directly into adobe camera raw when you use the smart object option. So now we can look at this image with fresh eyes. You know, a couple of days have passed. We can look at it and say, You know what? This isn't bad, but I want to enhance the saturation. Okay, I want to bring up the warmth a little bit more. Maybe a little bit magenta into the image because it's a male in a dark environment. Let's go with clarity. Give it that gritty edge. Click OK, and then see what it looks like inside of Adobe Photo shop. I look at it again and I go. You know what? It's too bright. It should be darker than this. So once again, all I can do is double click inside of the thumbnail. It brings me right back into camera raw and I can pull back on these shadows. Go OK, and once again evaluate what I have. I like it better, but his face is plugged in. So once again, I can go back into camera raw and then use the local adjustment brush. I'm going to make it very bright just so I could see what I'm doing. Make my brush bigger, and then just paint in this general area right here and then set these settings back to zero and then very slowly bring in more detail back into his face, create another new brush, do it once again 20 00 But then this time, put some more color back into his chest. Drop the highlights, dropped the shadows just to try and balance it out a little bit more. You get the idea. I can sit in here and go back and forth and tweak it to my heart's content. I can do anything that I want as long as I want. And as long as you know how to use the tool of adobe camera raw, there's nothing that can stop you from doing a huge amount of work inside of camera raw without ever needing Photoshopped to begin with. Okay, so technically speaking, what I'm looking at on this cheap monitor that I happen to be working on, it gets encoded for the Internet and then you watch it so the colors are probably out to lunch. I say this many of my videos. Just assume it looks absolutely fine. And we both agree that it looks good. So now I'm ready to move on past this, I'm gonna click, OK? And I'm going to give this image one last evaluation before moving into photo shop. Officially, this is one of the big benefits of using smart objects. Aiken jump back and forth between photo shop in adobe camera raw and tweak the color based off of the original ones and zeros that the camera saw, as opposed to adjustment layers that are adjusting pixel information. We're using the raw data information. Now, the next big benefit of using smart objects is going to be the introduction of smart filters. When I zoom in on this image, you can see that there's a lot of grain because the ice so was very high. It's now one of the reasons that we have noise. It's a strong is coming from the raw data. I'm gonna go in here one more time and I'm going to go over to this panel right here. Details. This is also a light room as well, and here it's adding a sharpening to the image. Unfortunately, in an image like this, all it's doing is sharpening the noise. It's not actually sharpening the details in the image. So you're much better off simply turning that off and going. Okay, notice that I'm jumping around. I did all this color correction work, and now I'm going back to remove sharpening its the flexibility that I really like about this workflow. Instead, I'm gonna come down to noise reduce noise. Now, to be clear, I wouldn't normally be using this filter, cause I don't think it does a particularly good job. I'm simply giving you an example of the type of work that I would dio. And so as it finishes, we can go back to our history palette and we can see the before and after before and after . Yeah, okay. It removes some noise. That's fine. So let's keep going. So we'll go through unsure mask and will make these changes, and we say okay, and when you look, you'll see that if we were working on a pixel based image, it simply would work on it one step at a time. And if you wanted to go backwards to one of the previous steps, you would have difficulty doing that primarily because you've moved past that point. However, with smart objects and smart filters, that's not the case. If I wanted with just the uncharted mask, all I have to do is double click on it. I can simply open it back up and adjust the settings. I can bring this down to here, click OK and instantly. It makes those changes for us. If we don't like the way that then reduce noise came out, we can either double click on it and change that as well, by simply moving the sliders around and saying OK, or we can simply take the smart filter itself and throw it in the trash. And then it will go back and re render all the other smart filters without that smart filter that we just removed. So in general this is an incredibly efficient way to work, because what it allows me to do is jump around to different stages between working on color , tone and special effects, and I can jump around and manipulated as I see fit, because, let's say I come in here and I add an adjustment layer and I'll come down to the whites and I'll pull out some yellow. Okay, great. But you know, when I look at it at this point, I'm like, You know what? There's still a little bit more work that I could do inside of the raw file. Well, I have to do is just double click on this, and I'm right back into the camera. Raw filter. So it's great for jumping around. I'm not really locked into anyone workflow. That forces me to work on tone than color than cloning, then special effects. I have a great deal of flexibility and moving around, allowing me to tweet the file as much as I want by using either photo shops, tools or the raw processing tools. 2. Problems With Smart Objects: now. Luckily, I don't run into many problems by using smart objects. However, you do need to know that there are some limitations that need some work arounds in order to overcome their limitations and allow them to work in a way that you expect them to. So let's start off with this image here. I like it as it is, So I'm going to right click on it, edit in. Remember not using at it in photo shop, but rather open a smart object in photo shop. This going to open a photo shop and place it as a smart object that will allow us to work on the raw information once again. Additionally, we can use the smart filters, and those will allow us to push and pull this image to our heart's content now. I previously said that smart objects allow me to no longer be forced into doing things in a particular order because I can jump around from one topic to the next, and I can let the image evolve and grow based off of how I think the last change affected the image going forward. So let me show you one of the core drawbacks of using smart objects. As you know, I can come in here by double clicking on the some nail I can open up the exposure, for example, just a little bit go. OK, we could look at this and say Great, Perfect. We love it. So if we take your clone stamp and begin to clone stamp on it, you'll notice that you can't actually do it because you can't clone directly onto a smart object which unwto itself isn't a problem because you shouldn't be cloning on the background layer. Anyway, You should always be creating a new blank layer on top. And with your tool selected of cloning or healing, either one of those should be set to current and below. If you're cloning and nothing is happening, you're probably stuck on current layer as opposed to current and below, because we want to pick up this information to the upper layer. So I'm just gonna zoom in, move this over, and with my clone stamp, I'll create my source and I'll work on my destination. Great, Good enough, and I just created one little area in there. Oh, fine. I'll do one more right there and they're great. Okay, So if I hide the background layer, you could see that what we have is two different areas that I've done some cloning on. And then we look at it and say, Oh, you know what? I want to adjust something on this inside a camera, Rajan. So if I double click on this and I open up camera raw and I make a change, take a Grady a moving across this way. Ah, change that tone again. What we do doesn't really matter, because once you come back into photo shop, you're going to see that we had a huge problem. Those areas that we cloned are still holding on to the old information, whereas thes smart object changed the raw file. So in this case, it's quick and easy to erase everything that's on this layer and just do it again. But best practice shows that you need to get your color, your tone and your special effects. Right before you ever start cloning, you have to have that base image exactly the way that you want it. Before you start cloning on top of it. Because if you start cloning like this and then realize you need to change the image. You can no longer go back to this raw file, but instead you have to go with the adjustment layers so that they include it from the top down. For example, if I want to make a change here and I do this, this change is above the cloning and smart object, because if I move that cloning layer above the curve, you'll see that we bumped into the exact same problem that we had before. But because everything and Photoshopped goes from the top down, we would need to use this adjustment layer on top of it and begin working on our file from a raster based pixel information point of view. The only other option that you might possibly have is is to take these two layers, which is the cloning layer and the smart object. Select both of them, right click and then go down to convert to smart object. Then basically what we're doing is we're taking that cloning and the smart object and putting it inside of yet another smart object. This is one of those topics that really starts confusing people, but really all it is is like those old Russian dolls where you have the big one, You take the head off and then a little one comes out. You take the head off in a little one, comes out and take the head off, a little one comes out. So basically, you're just stacking them inside of other smart objects. So this is now our top layer smart object. Inside of here is what we were working on previously, which has are cloning layer and our first smart object. And inside of here, when I double click on it is the original raw file. So they're just stacked inside of each other, and that does get a bit confusing. I'm gonna close that and close that. So they were at the top layer right now. And if I really wanted to, it would be in here that I could go up under filter camera, raw filter, and then I can open up what is effectively camera raw once again and do whatever change that I want to do to the image. Go OK. And it's going to incorporate this change onto the cloning layer because that's actually hiding inside of here. And when I double click on that. Here is that original file with the cloning that's really bright. It's this file that has that darker effect on top of it, and I do understand that starts getting confusing. And that's why I try not to use smart objects inside of smart objects inside of smart objects. Not because I necessarily become confused by them because I do understand them. But it just becomes really annoying when I want to make a change all the way back to the beginning. And I gotta open up all these files to make the change to come all the way back out. But when using smart objects, this is one of the prices that you pay when you're doing this. So what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to back up with the history. Before I did that stuff and we're gonna go back to this point, I'll throw that away. And so now we're just back to the smart object, and inside of here is the raw file, so there's nothing fancy about it. We got the rough file, and then we have a smart object. Now, as I've said before, smart filters allow us to choose any one of these options and create a special effect right on top of the smart object. Click OK, and it simply adds that filter underneath it. If we If we don't like that effect, weaken, double click on it. We can change it, modify it, click OK, and we're moving on. If we have multiple filters, we can make changes toe any of them, and it re renders all that information. If we don't want to see them anymore, we click this little tick arrow and then hides them. Click it again. It opens it up. Working with smart filters is often incredibly easy to dio. However, there is one caveat. Using any of photo shops built in filters generally seems to work just fine. I've really haven't bumped in any problems using any of these. However, once you start introducing third party filters as plug ins, that's when things can get a little problematic. Now, generally speaking, the plug ins that I use from image gnomic picture code I don't have a problem with, and they behave just like any other filter built in the photo shop. Unfortunately, the brand topaz, all of their filters seem tohave some problems with smart objects. So if you plan and using topaz filters with your smart object, I generally steer you away from that because it seems to be a known issue that it doesn't work quite a swell and strange things begin to happen with these Topaz plug ins. So more than likely, if you have some smaller third party plug ins, you'll probably bump into the same problem. And that brings me to one of the plug ins that are built in the photo shop that I know give us problems and that one is adaptive white angle. What adaptive? What angle does is the same thing effectively as lens correction. Basically, it's gonna go in here. It's gonna straighten the image. It's going to correct any disc Ewing or distortion due to the camera's lens. And what ends up happening with this adaptive white angle is you can use it, and it works Fine, However, when you go to crop an image after the fact, I find that this particular filter is very predictable in that it no longer honors those straight lines that you created with it. If you crop the image afterwards, it kind of strangely distorts things and throws it back to the way that it was before you ever ran the filter. So the solution of that is actually the same as it was for that previous cloning layer. Where you need to do is grab all of the layers that you have and convert all of those into a new smart object. If you do that and include that adaptive white angle, you can now crop it afterwards because that UN cropped version is protected within the smart object itself. And yeah, I know this stuff starts getting really confusing, but let me try giving you another problem that is solved with the exact same work around. If I go under filter noise, add noise and I'm gonna crank this up so that it's really obvious. I added noise and I'm gonna go OK, and then I'll go filter camera, raw filter. It doesn't matter what filter I choose. I'm just simply giving an example and then I go OK. One of the limitations with smart objects is that they currently use one mask for all of the smart filters. This is my number one, complete with smart objects which simply means that if I want this noise on the background , not on him, then I can take my paintbrush. Click on the mask with black instead of white because the mask it's white. I'll use black, make my brush bigger and if I take my time, I can go in here and I can paint it out and get a nice clean mask without any noise on him whatsoever. However, in doing so, I've taken this camera raw filter and again it could be any smart filter. This is tied into the same mask, which means what I'm doing this ad noise to the background and I'm ask it out. That change that I made to the camera raw of saturation is also affecting the background. It's not affecting him, but I want that one to the be the other way around. I want the noise to affect the background, and then I want the saturation toe affect the subject him, and you can't do that inside a photo shop with only one mask. Now, this is a huge limitation with smart objects. No, I do have a work around for this. It is a huge problem. Inside a photo shop. But basically what the's adobe engineers need to do is to create one mask for one filter in another mask for another filter, and I'm sure they'll introduce it in the future. Rusian a photo shop. But as of today, it doesn't work that way, so that means that we don't have many options. The solution that I propose is this one. I'm going to take the camera raw filter, which is saturation, and throw it away and leave just thes smart filter of add noise. Now, even though it's just a simple, smart filter, this mask means I can't add another smart filter onto here without in applying that same mask to it. So what you need to do is right. Click on the layer and go convert to smart object, which means that you're going to take the smart object with smart filter and that mask and put it inside of another smart object. But what it's gonna do is release this mask from the new smart object so that I can now go grab the next filter, make the change that I want to make and then apply a mask to this filter, doing the opposite of what it did the last time. Okay, so in no way is this ideal. But it's a solution to the problem where here's one filter with one mask inside of the smart object is the other filter with the other mask. And inside of this smart object is the raw file. So all this really means is until Adobe fixes some of these bugs, glitches and otherwise problems in the workflow, you will occasionally have to create a smart object and put it inside of another smart object and unnecessarily make this way more complicated than it otherwise needs to bay. 3. Smart Objects For Design: So let's say we spent all this time working on an image. We did stuff in camera raw. We did stuff in photo shop. We've really worked on this image. We spent an hour on it. When we like the image, we want to do something with it. We might want to turn it into a flyer. We might might want to turn it into a Facebook cover image, something that requires us to do something extra that falls less on the retouching. More on the design side. Now what we're doing specifically here is simply an example. But how you can apply this technique is going to be completely up to you. So let's say we have this full size image and we want to do something completely different with it. What say it's something for the Internet. What's do 12 80 by 7 20? What does this number mean? I have no idea. I'm just making it up as I go along. We'll say Okay, but now we have a wide version of something that we're going to use on the Internet. So simply for an example, rather than working with something with a white background, let's make it black. So I'm going to fill this with black and then I'll take text and we'll do that. Okay, We'll take it and drop it down there. You can change font size, all that other stuff, but it doesn't matter now if we were going to take this image as it stands, this is a layered file and we want to keep that for long term archival purposes. But we want to inside of this low rez J peg that we're going to be placing on the Internet . So standard practice would be to right, click on it and say Merge layers and that would flatten it down toe a raster image. If we were to take that and bring it over to this file by dragging and dropping it, it would come in, is very, very large. I can then go at it free, transform. And then here's a little trick. Control zero is going to reduce it down to the size of what we're actually trying to fit into this window, hold down the shift key and shrink it this way and shrink it this way and bring her down here. And we've just reduced her 71.72%. And I'll say, OK, the little check box. Now we have her place to remove the text above that layer, moving over here and once again at it. Free transform. Okay, great. The details of this air completely irrelevant. I can, of course, design this and make it really, really pretty. But you get the idea. We have the girl and we have the text and she's been placed. But now let's say after we start getting all the pieces aligned, we realize that she really isn't at the correct size that we want to use. We want to scale it once again. So if I go in it free, transform control zero and I scale her down mawr What it's actually doing when it reduced it. This 96.10% is it reduced it the first time. Now it's reducing it the second time. So we've taken what was effectively good, clean, layered files based off of raw information, and we've we've pixelated it because we merged all those layers. We scaled it down. Now we're scaling it down again. So it's scaling based off of the scaling based off of the Rast Oring, based off of the original raw data. My point here is that this is no longer clean re sizing. If we say OK to this, move her around and then once again decide that we want to scale it yet again. For whatever reason, it's scaling. The scaling, which was scaled off of the raster, which is based off of the raw file every time we scale moved to store, were damaging this image rather than doing it this way. Let's incorporate the smart object and do it a much more efficient way. I'm going to throw away this sky rast arised layer because that thing is just getting damaged upon damaged and I'm going to go back to the original file, which has all of our layers and all of the high end information. I'm going to select all these layers, right click and convert to smart object. Now, if I do it this way, it's going to take all of those layers and make a very large smart object, which could be fine. It might be what you want to dio, but not necessarily for this J peg version. Rather what you might want to do to save space is to merge the layers the same as you did before. But follow that up with another right click and go down to convert to Smart object. Now is a smart object. Weaken, Bring this layer into the Lorries J Peg. Now we can bring this smart object into the lower is J peg at it Free transform just like we did before. Control zero scale this down to size I'll even scale it like this so that it has that black border. Move it down Click OK, realize that we have that black border And so But simply go at it free Transform and scale it up again and then go OK, move it down Decide that we really don't like the size at a later point in time. Once again you can go at a free transform and then resize it. Drop it in and then go. OK, move it around. It doesn't matter because it's a smart object. Every time you resize, it goes back to the original information and you don't lose anything. You don't damage it. You don't rast arise on top of pixelated On top of any event, other bad stuff all you're doing is scaling it. If you want to scale it again, it re scales it based off of the old math, not the scaled math, which is then scaled math, which is then scaled math. And ultimately, this is a much cleaner way to work. So whenever I'm doing banners and Facebook ads and all kinds of stuff that require me to take my layer files and change their shapes and skew them and otherwise make them fit, I'm always working off of some level of a smart object. This way I can resize them all to my heart's content. Now, that doesn't mean that you need to use it this way. It's simply an example of it. If you know, smart objects can be scaled to any level again and again. It just gives you the freedom to create these smart objects and then play with them until you get them the way that you want them. Yeah, you're raw. File size is gonna be larger than it otherwise would be, but your end result is going to be much cleaner based off of the original information 4. Linked Smart Objects: now it's pretty obvious I didn't actually do anything to this image. But let's play pretend. Let's say I have a cloning way or in a whole bunch of groups. Let's say I took all the time to really get in here and make this image look great. Let's also continue to pretend, let's say, came off of a 36 megapixel camera. And let's say that all of these different layers, all the different things that went into this file turn this into a 1.5 gigabyte file. And then let's just say for the sake of argument, we want to use that retouching information that we did on the guy and so wet him so that he is separate from this background, meaning that if I take all of these layers and I right click, and I convert all of these into a new smart object. So it's going to collapse all of these different layers and put them into a single layer for me and I then put on a mask onto the layer so that I can paint with black and hurt edge and literally just cut out this background. So let's pretend I took the time to cut this out and made this really nice. And I made this look really cool. And we no longer have this original background, okay? And instead, I want to replace this background with another incredibly large layered file. So let's say I've taken the time to go in here and create all these new layers and sub layers and all this other stuff, okay? And we put in a ton of work into this file and we want to put this as a background to this one. That means I can take all of this, put it inside of its own folder and call it back. Then. As you can see, they're all still hiding in there and I simply drag and drop it into this other file. We put it behind him, and now he's over this completely different background. Now, I want you to really understand what happened inside of this smart object with the mask is 1.5 gigabytes worth of high end retouching. As a background, we have all of these layers and clones and all different stuff that went into creating this background, which is also 1.5 gigabyte file and we say this as a new three gigabyte file. So far, so good. It's a large file, but we can certainly work with it because we can save it. We can manipulate it. It's running a little slow on our computer, but it's still working. So let's say, in order to combine these together and just the edges, we need to create a few more layers and a few more groups and whatever. And then we go to save it. And suddenly it says that we can't save the file because it's too big now to understand the file formats a PSD, which is a photo shop document Onley supports two gigabytes. I don't know about you, but I blow two gigabytes out of the water every week, which is why I immediately save all my files as tiff because Tiff will take four gigabyte files. But in this case, if the foreground was 1.5 in the background was 1.5 and all these extra layers or another one gigabyte, we've just created a 4.5 gigabyte file, give or take, but ultimately you can no longer save in the tiff format. Does all this sound crazy to you? Maybe, but in my world, I bump into this as a real world situation. Not when I work on Portrait's, but when I work on composite images. That's when these file sizes get completely out of control. So even if this doesn't describe the type of worker doing, just hear me out. Maybe you'll see value in learning how to do this, because you'll learn another way to solve a core fundamental problem and ultimately allow you to work a lot faster inside a photo shop. So let's break this down for a second. I'm gonna take these group of layers and call them new changes. We can change this one to subject in this background, which is made up of all these loose layers. I'm gonna change this into another smart object, and I'll name it background. So now we know his background is 1.5 gigabytes. We know that the subject is another 1.5 gigabytes, and the new changes is another gigabyte Now, even if you weren't dealing with files quite this large, the core problem remains where, despite the file size being too large for the general tiff format every time you want to save this file, it has to go through all of the mathematical conversions and whatever it actually does in order to save a file, it has to crunch all these numbers. And you're sitting here waiting for this little bar to run across the bottom of the screen here in order to make it work. And it is true that inside a photo shop CS six and C. C. You no longer have to wait in order for it to finish saving in order to keep moving. But your computer's actually sitting there going, I can't do new stuff. I'm working on old stuff. Give me a minute. That's basically what your computer is saying. So my suggestion is going to be this. If this is a smart object and this is a smart object, and these are the new changes that are original to this particular file that we're working on, I'm going to suggest this right click on the background and go down to convert toe linked and watch what this is going to do. It's going to create this new pop up for us so we can click on our destination of wherever we want to save this particular smart object of the background and we will just call it background dot psb A PSB is slightly different than a p s d a p s d is a Photoshopped document. A psb is photoshopped big. You see Ah Photoshopped document is only two gigabytes but a PSB goes much larger. In fact, don't even know how large it is a gigabytes I don't know, I've never actually tried. But I do know that it goes larger than four, which is a tiff, and that's very important. And even more important is it appears be has higher compression ratio, which means that if you have this stiff and you save it as a PSB instead it's going to be significantly smaller. Now there is a limitation with the PSP's that I will talk about coming up. But for right now, the PSB is definitely the solution around this problem. So I'm going to name it background PSB, and then I'm going to save the file. And if you look over here, it changed from the old smart object icon over toe a linked icon. That means that this file of 1.5 gigabytes is no longer part of this whole file. It's already been off saved into a separate file. It's only being referenced in this file, which means that we're no longer at this 1.51 point five and one gigabyte file. Now we're only down to maybe 30 megabytes and the 1.5 gigabyte in the one gigabyte, which really only brings us down to the 2.5 gigabytes. So let's do the same thing to this layer here. Let's take that smart object and go down to convert toe linked once again, save this to a location. Now we have this 1.5 and 1.5 gigabyte files saved as to 1.5 gigabyte files, which, by the way, could actually be linked out to your original files. If you worked on them properly, there's no reason that you have to have them in here or create new ones. You're simply linking out to the originals. So here we have 1.5 and 1.5, which has really been turned into 30 megabytes and 30 megabytes, which is 60 megabytes, and whatever changes were in here, what say they were the one gigabyte now the files only one gigabyte in 60 megabytes, which is a fraction of the original size that it waas. And we can now easily save this back out as a layered tiff. And if we ever happen to need to make a change inside of one of these linked files, all you need to do is double click on it and it's gonna open up all of those layers for us so we can make the change. Close it, save it, and then it's going toe update, which is going to have the original file linked to it. I hope this wasn't too incredibly confusing for you. I hope at this point, after watching all these smart objects criss crossing each other with other smart objects that you get the basic concept that all you're doing is putting a file inside of another file inside of another file inside of another file. And the benefit to that is you can continue to work on much larger files while still maintaining a computer that works in a relatively quick period of time to make your changes and save the main file that you're working on because It's not dealing with all this excess information that's already been saved to the drive. And just to give you an idea of how this works in practice, this figure, this upper part of her body, like from the Shoulders Up is actually a 36 megapixel camera. But I didn't want to lose all that data by shrinking it down to the size of the full image on the magazine, which is only nine by 12 I kept it at its original size of 36 megapixels. The lower half of the body is a portrait, which is also 36 megapixels and all these different pieces in the background, from this solar system to the vector art to the glow to the flares. And all of this stuff is just built on top of this incredibly large figure image that's approximately 36 inches wide by 48 inches tall. Did I need to work on it this way? No, of course I didn't. I could have worked on it by nine by 12 and just built into the size of the magazine. But by doing it this way, it was no skin off my back. It wasn't difficult to work with. And yet, if I ever need a full size of this image, I haven't readily available to me. 5. PSB Format and Lightroom: I have one last, incredibly strange glitch that I want to talk about when it comes to working with not necessarily smart objects, but piggybacking off of the last topic is working with PSB files. Those photos shot big files that allow you to work with very large files in the last video . What I was able to do was, rather than working with PSD s at two gigabytes or tiffs at four gigabytes, we could work with PS bees, which allow the files ah, higher compression rate, thereby making them smaller. The core problem is this. If we were to work on a file that was incredibly complicated, like this one, and we save any of these loose files linked out as PSB files. Even though the PSB is an adobe format, for whatever reason, light room simply does not read PSB files. So if you're the type of person that either saving your final file as a PSB or you're saving out those linked files is PSP's, whatever your reasoning is, those PSP's will not reimport back into light room. And if you go looking for him, you're not going to find them. And if that happens to be the case, then you need to try and re save them as tiff format. And maybe they'll be small enough if you get rid of some excess masks or whatever that you don't actually need. Or you would actually need to save a low rez file as a reference inside a light room just to know it exists, so you can go find the large size file afterwards anyway, this is incredibly strange glitch in adobes workflow. It's their own format, and they don't support it in all their programs anyway. It's a very strange glitch that I hope they correct in the near future. 6. Two Last Tricks for Smart Filters: So I have a smart object here and I'm gonna go filter noise, add noise, and we have this cranked all the way up to 55.11 ghazi and monochromatic and they go OK, so now, as you know, by now, if we think that this setting is too high, we can double click on the name of the smart filter, lower it and say OK, and that's going to lower the strength of that filter. However, there's another way to do the exact same thing, plus, have a little bit more control over the filter itself. On the smart filter, we have three things on the line. The 1st 1 is the I, which allows us to hide and show the effect. The second thing we have is the name of the filter itself, and the 3rd 1 is this little double arrow thing that's going on over here. If you double click on this, it's going to open up blending options, and you could do two very different things in here. The first thing is you can drop the opacity of the effect, so this is kind of similar to dropping the strength of it. But depending on the filter itself, It may give you a completely different look by changing the A pass ity as opposed to the strength of the filter itself. The other thing that we have up here is the blending mode, just like layers and brushes. We have an assortment of choices in here that we can use that will allow the filter to interact differently to the smart object. For example, if I change this to luminosity, I don't see much change. But if I go to multiply, it's very different. So just like all the other blending modes inside a photo shop, sometimes you just have to play around a little bit to see if you can get the effect that you're looking for mix and match the options and see what you come up with Now. The other thing that I want to show you about smart filters actually doesn't have anything to do with filters at all. You can find all of your filters under the filter menu, and any of these will turn into a smart filter. However, there's another place to find very different filters that's actually under image adjustments, and I know what you're gonna say these aren't filters, these air adjustments and I agree with you wholeheartedly. However, watch this. If I go to levels and it pops up with this dialog box and I make this change and go, OK, you see where it put it? It added it as a smart filter. And just like all other smart filters, I have the option to double click on it and go right back into the dialog box. Now, if you're familiar with photo shop, you're probably going to ask the question. Well, why would you use a levels smart filter when you can just as easily use a levels adjustment layer? And I agree with you wholeheartedly because ultimately you're going to get the exact same look by doing it up here as you are doing it down here now. Technically, there probably isn't much of a difference, but I will address the question is directly as I can, as you know, the smart filters only going to affect the smart object, whereas the adjustment layer is going to affect anything that's below it, including other layers. However, if you really did want it to affect just the smart object, if you want to start getting technical. I could get a little bit geeky here and hold down my all key or option on a Mac, and that is going to change the cursor to this little box with a down arrow when I hover it between the two layers. If I now click with the mouse, we get this down arrow. And basically that means that this effect in this case levels is directly affecting the smart layer itself. If I had other layers in here, it would actually ignore those because it's on Lea attached to this smart object itself. So in this case, both the adjustment layer and the smart filter layer are affecting the smart object in the exact same way. If we go back under image adjustments, we can use any of these as a smart filter in the exact same way. And since technically all of these air available as adjustment layers, there really is no need to be using them as a smart filter. However, you may notice the two at the bottom are not available. A smart layer options, which means that I can click on shadows and highlights, and I now have the option of using this tool, although quite honestly, I'm not quite sure why you'd want to. I hate this tool, but there you go. It does attach it as a smart filter, the other one that you saw under there, which was HDR toning. Looks like it could be something that you could play around with. However, once you click on it, it immediately says that you can't do it on a smart object and it will flatten the document . Oh, well, there goes that idea. So in a way, those are just a couple more things that you can play with when using smart objects.