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Help for Those Who Need It

Last Updated on Thursday, 20 March 2008 00:15 Written by Victor Thursday, 30 August 2007 02:00

What is a smart object?

I recently received some emails asking for help regarding the transformation of ready made photoshop documents, so about the templates. Most of them have more detailed instructions inside.

I often use smart objects: I transform a regular layer into a smart object because of quality reasons and ease in further editing by my downloaders. So you might think that this is hard or complicated, but actually it’s all made to help you and make the hole thing easier.

These smart objects can be edited in simple ways.

How to recognize a smart object?

Usually you can tell which layer is a smart object by it’s characteristics.
It has a small square at the bottom right corner on the layer preview picture in the layers palette.
When you left click the layer that was transformed into a smart object and select the move tool on your tools palette and try to resize it for example, then it gets two crossed diagonal lines from corner to corner on it.
When you right click the smart object’s title in the layers palette, you see the smart object menu that also contains edit contents which you need to click to edit that layer. And click that.

How to edit these smart objects?

Often enough I transform text layers into smart objects, to enhance the text effects, to automate some effects, or to achieve a certain design or shape that can only be done that way to make it editable too (you want to be able to change the text too after I make it, don’t you?).

So after clicking edit contents on the smart object layer palette menu, if it’s a text, and you want to write something else then select the type tool and with that cursor select the text layer on your canvas and replace it just like that.
Do the same way with pictures. Select the edit contents button, find a picture on your computer, drag it on your photoshop window(it opens a new window) and drag it again with the move tool to insert. Remember to save your smart object (which makes a temporary .psb file).

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