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Day 13: Smart Objects & Smart Filters II (More Advanced)

welcome back to day two of smart objects and smart filters this is such a huge topic that I want to make sure we went into lots and lots of details sorry I roll up my sleeves for this important topic we're going to get even deeper into smart object smart filters show you a couple of example for example is one more example of the template kind of idea and then mohr examples of smart filters and will even start putting smart objects in sight smart objects and we'll touch on what you have adobe illustrator and you want to incorporate illustrator files in photo shop using this smart object concept so the first example I want to show you a template is an interesting one I think because it was a real world example a friend of mine who's a photographer decided that he wanted to offer his digital images to his clients but at a premium is that another is giving them a way he was going to charge quite a bit of money for them and he decided to make it part of a sales feature he wanted to show the...

m this is what you get a beautiful dvd case with your images on it with your photo on it because he has the ability to print on discs and so on so but he wanted to be able to show them this is what your photo would look like on a disk so he found a stock photo of a blank disc and a cover and wanted to be able to put the photograph on there and he struggled and was able to get a photo on there with a bit of effort and when he showed it to me my response was wouldn't you want to make that a template so you could just replace it with another photograph very easily and he's here's production went template and I said okay it's not technically all the template it's smart objects that can be used as a form of temple so here's what I'm talking about here's the photograph and what I'm going to do for the purpose of demonstration is used a layer that I'm going to call a place holder and it's basically just a big rectangle that I made sits in the same ratio as you would have if you just took a regular photograph and put it in there so that's going to be my place holder that I will use that eventually will replace with a photo so before doing anything else I'm going to convert it to a smart object now I want multiple copies of it there's going to be one on the case there's going to be one on the disk and it's really hard to see but there's actually a little reflection here so ultimately I'm going to need four of them so I'm going to just work on one of them but I have all these other copies so I need to free transform this layer to fit the disc while one of the nice things about you working with free transforming capacity even though I've already hit free transform it would be kind of hard for me to see what I'm doing because I can't tell where everything is so even though I've already done free transform I can lower the opacity a lot a little bit of this layer so I can see what I'm doing now have a better sense of matching things up so I'm gonna hold down the commander control key because that's the one that lets me move the corners independently and again if this was a really live project I would be zooming in much closer and making sure I was deadly accurate but for now we're going to try and do a good enough job that you can see the idea of what we're getting I entered to finalize it and then put the opacity back up again and there's a couple things about it obviously that aren't working yet and one of them is we can't see the disc and also in the original there's a really nice shadow cast by the disc so I'm gonna take this layer and change it to multiply mode then we're going to go back to this layer take our quick selection tool and we're gonna use that to make a mask on this layer and for some reason it's not work so well and a master not sure why that didn't work that was kind of odd so often these things happen so I'm going to fill this with black and then I just need to invert it that's more effort than it normally be and then I also noticed there was a little piece in here that I should have also included because it's see through so on here I want to make sure that was also available and this is where this would be the time part of this where you have to go in and do the work to make sure it's looking realistic but for now I'm just going to start doing the first couple of bits and show you the idea so let's move on now to our next one this is the one I want to position over my disk so the same thing applies I'm goingto lower the opacity going to scale this down as much as we can to try and fit within this disc and hide it go back to this layer take our quick selection tool and see if it works this time no that's weird my ability to create a mask is suddenly disappear let's see if I could do it this way that work which is weird all right so use that to multiply mode so now I'm starting to build up the idea here and I would eventually take these layers and free transformed them and do all that kind of stuff I'm not going to do all of those things because I want you to see the idea of what the end result would look like so I'm gonna take these layers that I just created and delete them because I already have a bunch of layers and all I did in this case let's make this a little bigger so you can see it in one go so you can see I have my initial placeholder that's got the mask and I have a reflection that has another mask and I have the disk with a mask and reflection with a mask but ultimately thes air all the same place holder that I made it to a smart cop and remember one of the key concepts of working with smart objects is replace contents so what I want to do is replace the contents of this with something else now in other cases I couldjust right click or control click and shoes replaced contents but here because this is kind of a unique size I'd be a little worried that things might not match up so instead it might make better sense in this case too double click to look at the contents and you see my contents were two layers that I used on my placeholder so once I've got that open now let's say I want to place replace it with this set of layers this is just a background layer with a white box of semi see through in some text of course this could have been a camera smart object happens not to be but it certainly could have I'm going to drag this and here's the key I'm gonna drive this into the the contents document that open not the one with the desk but the one that just had that placeholder going to drag these layers into this placeholder document now I see it's a good thing that I didn't just choose replace contents because the size doesn't match up but that's okay because I can hit free transform and then fit in window and now we're gonna scale this down to the point of saying right about there and I save and as soon as I come back you see it's done it's already in there it's hard to see but you can even see there's a bit of a reflection there so photo shop has done all the work for me I basically did the work up front with this place holder but then when I was ready I just said replace it with a different photograph now there's a couple things like for example in this case I don't I would like it if the janet and james was a little further down I could potentially move it down a little bit but ideally I might want to actually edit this bit of texture this text in the box I will do that by going back to the contents and then we'll take these two layers take our move tool and just kind of pushed him down a little bit I'm just kind of doing a bit of a guess here hitting save and then coming back and you'll see it's updated moved just enough time maybe I'll do it just a little here more ok just a bit maybe that it saved that's better I can close this other one so now I would save this disc in case doc psd file as my template that's the one I'm going to keep coming back to and all I ever have to do let's pretend fast forward it's now three weeks later I'm ready to sell the concept of using disks are getting your images on this to some other client so I do the same thing I double click on any one of my placeholders and then I could do in this case file place and I'm gonna go find the next image I want which is a raw files all hit place it will say would you like to adjust this and I'll say it just a little bit hit okay it places him here and again just a side note a reminder the reason I use place in this case because I knew it would automatically scale up just to the right size I could have opened it and dragged it in like I did with the other multi layer document but here this just working better it enter and I hit save it's going to save that one and it was waiting for it to save once I do it's done now this one has a bit of an issue but we've got our layer with the mask reminder that they're not linked together that's how I'm able to reposition this layer would not want tohave it mask is it wouldn't work now it lost a little bit of the effect here with the shadow because this photo is so dark you get the idea that at any point you can just say let's just this this is a camera raw smart object and because it's in multiply mode it's getting quite a bit darker so I'm going to kind of push the exposure and open up the shadows and blacks little bit in in anticipation for the fact that when I save it in my other document it's going to take this updated but also put it in that multiply mode so that's why it's a little better so if you know you have a layer in multiply mode than you might want to make it just a hair brighter initially so that it ends up looking the way you want now one of things that I also did by the way is on the side here I have dave cross photography and even it is a smart object so if I decided to change that maybe it would look better in this case if it was some other color this say that now updates as well so all e pieces of this template templates are always do the airport's on templates remind you it's not actually called a template in photo shop so don't go looking for that save as template I know I've said that a zillion times but I always wanna warn people because I'd hate to someone to say go into the q and a section and say our session and saying I can't find that save his template you are correct you can't because it's not called that when you say it is a psd file it's preserving all the layers and the mass everything else and it happens that is also in a sense is turning it into a temple or you can use it as a temple that's why I use that terminology technically it's not really called that but uh oh and one other thing I want to show you just to clarify again I think I've said this before but just to make sure look at the top of my document the psd file is my template in quotations when I double clicked on any one of those smart objects it opened a separate document called dot psb and that is my contents file so when here I have the original placeholder and all these other photos I've been working out now at a certain point you don't want to necessarily build this document up and add more and more and more layers to it so once you're finished with this one you could very easily decide I'm going to take these layers and delete that certainly that big x there whatever so you can certainly update just to save a little bit of space because in this main psd file all of these things are being saved so the more layers you have in your contents document the bigger the file is going to get overall so eventually you wantto slim that down a bit and get just to the the bare bones of what you need in terms of those elements okay let's take a look at another way that I can use this whole thing and I'm going to see if I can get many bridge to open be in the same place that I am okay good all right and the reason I'm doing this is because I want to be ableto place several images in at once and many bridge does that more evil you could use file place to do this one at a time or you could open the document separately I just like using the file place command in this case because it's even easier so what I want to do here's a photo of my son and let me say he's I'm sure terribly pleased to know I still use this photograph of him years later but that's okay that's what your families for use them in photographs like this and the reason I say that is because it happens that he has a big zit on his face which I'm sure he's terribly happy about the fact again tonight a show that over and over again but again that's the way it is so in here in this same folder I have three camera raw files and you can see from the little symbol on them I've already gone into camera and crop them but what I want to do is add them into this layout if you will so all I have here is a regular photo I've opened previously and got a bit more white space and I wantto import or place these three images and again the reason I'm doing it in many bridge is aiken select and drag all three at one time it's kind of a cool idea so I dragged him in I let go and it is okay so the first one is a camera rafael what would you like it to look like say I wanted to look like this and but more dramatic and clarity and hit okay it prepares it brings it in with handles and I can say and I'd like it to be this big assumes I hit enter it says all right well here's your next one so I can say let's use thie previous conversion so it looks the same pretty much click okay it prepares that one brings it in and the only thing I can't do completely automatically make them exactly the same size but aiken used my eyeballs to do that it enter and then it's going to say and here's the third one and do previous conversion okay and once again it's gonna spring that in and I'm gonna scale up to fit him enter by doing that now I have three camera raw files that were generated pretty easily okay there just a bit too big on select all three and transformed a little bit now I can kind of just accordingly and all I'm doing here is making sure I'm on the appropriate later first let's close down many bridge now this nose this up like that now one of the functions we did not talk about in layers so I'll talk about mention it now since it makes sense to do so I want to say hey let's have this top one position up here and the bottom one position there but I want to make sure they're evenly spread out instead of me eyeballing it I select all three layers and then with the move tool you'll see there's a series of options than now appear in the options bar and one of them is distribute evenly by their centers when you do that it does the math for years and so you having eyeball it and now I can just move them to the side so there's our nice little layout happening this one by the way could have been a smart object happens not to be in this case because I needed to add more white space but all these other ones are and that will be important shortly as we start experimenting with this so at this point now I'm faced with a situation that may actually do one more thing but frank's name in here that's pick some other typeface I don't know group's long keyboard shortcut all right so that's our layout that we're doing it right now and at this point I have five layers one of things that people let me pause and say at this point of course I would save this to make sure I had a psd file just as I experimented so that nothing would go wrong I'm not going to actually do it but I in theory I would put on a terrian reality I would actually do that but at this point I'm faced with a challenge because now I want to move on and do something else for example maybe I wanna sharpen this for printing where I want to add some effect or something like that well I've got five separate layers I have to do that all five independently which would be a bit of a pain especially if I needed to change the settings of that filter so what people used to do and I was a big advocate of this is there is a function photo shop and I'm going to show it to you but I suggest for the most part I wouldn't use this as much as is he smart object alternative but what you do is you have all the layers you want to include you had them all visible and in the layers panel in the pop up menu there's a command that says merge visible now if I did that it would be the same miss flattening so I don't want to do that I'm gonna undo it so I don't want to merge visible so what you do is hold out you could do one of two ways either hold down option are old and choose merge visible and that automatically merges everything into a new layer or I could have done that just from the keyboard and I like to call this shortcut the entire left side of your keyboard e command option shift ae on the mac control all shift ae windows and that creates a new layer with whatever is visible compressed into one which seems like a really good idea in fact for many years it was a great solution because this way as you can see in my layers panel it's preserved all the layers and I have this new kind of merged layer on top the problem with it is it's a snapshot of that moment in time so for example every layer was visible in these positions when I took that use that shortcut to create this new layer the problem is if I said you know what maybe I don't want the type player if I hide the type player nothing happens up here because that's just a picture it's a snapshot of every other layer so if I wanted for example to either hide a layer or move a layer or editor layer I'd have to throw away this top snapshot make whatever changed and then do another version of that snapshot which frankly in the old days like jokingly call old days like before smart objects that's how I would have done it because frankly there really wasn't a better alternative but now I think there is so just before I move on let me just say there are still plenty of people that used this merge visible thing and and it's fine is just be completely understanding of what it can and cannot do on what it I can't do is it will not update things live so here's what I would consider doing instead and I take all of these layers from the background layer right up to my type players select them all on again I just clicked on the top layer shift click on the bottom layer right or control click anywhere in here and she was convert to smart object and as we've seen before with smart objects it looks like this a bunch of layers has been flattened but it isn't is a smart object so in typical fashion how do we end it the contents of a smart object we double click on it and it's gonna open a separate window now I could hide the type player and hit save and now over here is gonna update once it finishes saving this is a fairly large files we're gonna take a second we see there we go now let's keep these two windows open and part of the reason for doing this is I mentioned is to say I want to apply a filter or do some effect or something like that so let's do I'm going to do over sharpened I wouldn't actually sharpen this much but I want you to be able to see what's happening here so I'm going to sharpen way more than I ever really would because the whole point of this is I want you to see that something is happening so don't ever use these numbers for sharpening again I'm just trying to let you see that something's happening here so clearly that's way over sharpened but that's alright because I want to show you again how live this is so at this point here's my working document with the smart filter and all my contents safely protected inside my magical container and here's the window that has the contents so this would be another case especially if I had a really nice big monitor that I might tile them so on the right side is are finished quote unquote document and the left side is the content so this way it's a lot easier for me to say well I'll just take this type player and move it down here and had saved and then after a couple of seconds of saving and updating its going to show me the results on this right hand side now I also noticed because I really sharpened he would love the fact that now I've made his pimple even more obvious so that's okay because back here in this document I can come back to my background layer take my spot healing brush now later on when we talk about retouching a lot of the time I don't retouch directly on a layer but in this case the chances are he won't ever say no dad I think I'd like to go back to the photograph with the big zit on my gym so I'm okay with working directly on this one with the spot healing brush doing that couple little updates here and as soon as I hit save you'll notice on this other document again once it finishes saving it's gonna update and it's going to reapply the filter with that over the top sharpening but what it means is that everything is open to negotiation if you will because for example remember these three layers are all camera smart objects so if I decide for example maybe this top one I don't like the way it looks now I can even double click on it to go back to camera raw too make an adjustment I'm going to make a really bad one just so you can clearly see what's happening here I wouldn't normally do this but just trying to show you a change okay it updates that which I then save and now it's updating over here and the thing that you need to remember here is even though I'm hitting save I'm saving editable contents inside a smart object and that's important distinction now it's you can see it is updated with that change or that save that I've made but that really is an important point because you know saving from everyday photo shop is pretty permanent if you save and close a document you've pretty much said well that's my new document but because I'm first of all saving a psd and more importantly inside that ptsd is information like camera smart objects and smart filters that means never am I stuck to the point as I've said many times we're going oh well I guess I have to live with that every single aspect of this can be edited right down to the point that I cropped these three photographs that are sitting on top of the background I could go back in the camera and change the prop aiken change how the anything any the camera settings I can also got back here I could decide maybe I don't like the order of these I want to move them order over I want to edit the typeface all of those things are possible even though I might have saved and created this two months ago everything can be edited and that's why the two most important aspects I wanted to take away from this thirty days among all the various things we'll talk about is non destructive and smart because to me that opens up a world of possibilities not just changing your mind but as we saw earlier with that kind of template function reusing and repurpose ing and all that kind of stuff saving you time and effort to create that so that's why I love using this method for some people at first there kind of a little bit hold on a second let me try to figure out what's going on here but just think about it from its benefits standpoint I can edit everything aiken edit thie on shark mask I could go into the contents and edit all of the different settings I can even dig into camera to me as a huge benefit is that option to do things that way now that was deliberately showing you something that took a little bit of kind of thought process to figure it out but I think you once you get used to the whole container contents to separate windows thing in photo shop then ultimately you'll start to get the hang of it whether it's camera smart object or whether it's this kind of thing of multiple layers or as we'll see in a second if it's no be illustrator file it's always the same thing you have this container layer called a smart object you double click on it to look at the contents the contents might be in camera raw it might be a separate window with multiple layers or it might even be a different application like adobe illustrator so let's take a look at that here so I've got a photo of a brick wall and I want to put a logo and make it look like it's kind of faded out well yeah faded out over time so this is an example of that displaced filter I showed you earlier where I need to create this thing called a map so one of the simplest ways of doing that is to just duplicate the image we're working on a copy and one of things with this displaced filter uses thing called a map and it's the highlights and shadows in that map it's not herman how much is going to distort things and if you have a photograph like this brick wall has a lot of really fine texture in it I find it works best if I go in I'm going to use a filter called de speckle directly on this because this is my separate copy document remember and what that does that just kind of softened it still keeps the details what takes away a lot of the little fine texture and I'm going to save this as a separate file and I always put the word map in the file it's not necessary however it is best if you save it as a jape excuse me as a psd file doesn't have to be gray scale in previous first the photoshopping did so if you have a reading on tutorial on displacement mapping and says make sure you change the mode of your map to gray scale that's no longer necessary so I'm just going to save this and then close this file all right so now we're back to just having our mean background file I want to take here's an illustrator following and see it it's called dot a I so it's in the ulcer file that I'm looking at enbridge as is always the case I can get it into photo shop in a number of different ways I could use the place command and say place into photo shop it's going to show me this as if it's a pdf file there's really no options here because it's just an illustrator file it now let me just clarify for a second earlier when we talked about opening files when we opened an illustrator file it came up with this dollar box saying things like what size you want what resolution do you want that's because I was opening it in in the photo shop here because we're placing it it's still vector and it's going to preserve all that so all I'm really doing is if I had more than one page I could pick the page on this case I really just have to click ok and it's gonna think about it for a second and bring it in now while it's doing that I also tell you I could open the illustrator file and copy and pays and I'll show you that in a second but since we're in the middle of pacing I'll let that happen but the main point of doing this is illustrator has the ability to scale up and down so when we first talked about smart objects and I said one of the things you have to keep in mind is it doesn't change the fact that you can't scale up bigger than the original here's the exception because with a photo shop file you turn into a smart object it was a certain point this was its maximum size you still can't go past that but when you bring in a vector file by nature vector is completely scaleable so even if you make it ten times bigger from a smart object perspective it will still update because it's tied back to that original illustrator vector five so here we are now it's finally updated and I could scale it up or down but honestly that part isn't really necessary because the fact that it's tied to the illustrator file means aiken size it at any time so let me actually show you that if I hit enter now it's got that little smart object symbol on it but the difference is they'll show you if I were to double click on it it will jump back to adobe illustrator but just to show you the idea of scaling I could scale it down really small same as before but then the other option is that I couldn't do with a photo shop smart object is aiken scale it even bigger than the original and I won't lose any quality because it's redoing the illustrator smart object so if you can bring in graphics that start in illustrator that's one of the benefits is this resize ability now because this is a smart object of course that means it's already ready for smart filters is already ready that sounded weird but it is so let's go again and do that displace filter and let's try again it's always a bit of a guessed the first time to figure out how much to put it I'm gonna just put twenty for both hit okay and then go and find that brick map that I say previously and had open and is going to distort things I would also probably I tried changing the blend mode to something else not that one let's use hard light so you can kind of see it looks like it's painted on but if I look a little more closely it's a little too much for my liking so I would double click it's okay what about if I did much smaller like six and then I choose that map again that looks a little better I could also on top of this use that those blend if sliders what if I took the underlying layer and kind of let it poke through all because my main goal here is to make it look like this was painted on the background a long time ago so this play with us a little bit so that's looking pretty interesting it looks to me kind of like it's painted on the background here but here's where the fun starts unlike before where if this was a photo shop file in fact I had a photo shot version of this it was just one graphic this one when I go to edit the contents it actually goes back to illustrator and says here it is in illustrator so this is bilby illustrator all of these are editable elements so if I take my type tool say whoops that was supposed to be seventy six all I have to do is save it and then when I go back to photoshopped it updates so now what I've done is I've created a link between illustrator and photoshopped so it has this edible vector quality that I really like so let's hide this for a second and show you if I was in illustrator now let's let me I keep doing this I start to show you something I think we'll wait but oh wait here's what I want to mention that if you're quite a proud member with the full credit cloud of course you have illustrator access as well even if you have some previous version I'm not suggesting that you're gonna go and learn every single aspect of adobe illustrator but here's an example of how without really knowing anything about illustrator we could take advantage of it fun reading a new document here and illustrator has a bunch of stuff which is kind of like clip art if I go to the window menu and I go to the symbol libraries and let's pick uh uh what should we do let's do this one erlend which is just a bunch of different objects and actually that's probably not the one I want let's try a different one this is the benefit of live recording is it's like I'm not sure which will not use so let's do it maybe this one there we go so these are all a bunch of predefined shapes that are kind of interesting I like this one all I have to do and this is where no knowledge of illustrators required except to find where these things exist I just drag this over onto my document and there I've got this shape that's already created looks fine exactly the way it is so all I do is hit coffee we'll do it so you see that I'm doing copy then I switch to photo shop let's make a new document is so it's easier to see and then I get paste on when you paste it says how would you like to paste it from illustrator into photo shop and I have four options each that have their own advantage to create the live edit ability smart object would be the best idea but I could also designed just to make it into pixels or these other options paths or shapes which we'll talk about in future lessons so for now I'm going to say smart object once again I decide yes I wanted this big and now I've got this graphic that's just sitting there ready to be used if I decide that in this case I want to edit it I double click and it goes back to illustrator now an illustrator this is the only kind of tricky part of this it's been set up in such a way that's a little bit different so I have to first go in and she was a command called expand so I have all the pieces of it now I can just click on and say I really wanted to be this color instead and I save it and then come back to photo shop and updates so illustrator technically this is called a vector smart object and what it means is we're now giving ourselves the ability to take graphics from illustrator either once we've created or ones like this that are in effect clip art and copying and pasting between the two with that two way street and again just to clarify the difference between creating a pixel based shape in photo shop and this in the first instance you can't scale it bigger than the original because that's again smart aren't that smart but if it's a vector smart object the nature of vector is completely scaleable so if you saw in that example I could take it and make it five times bigger if I wanted to that's not a problem at all all right so that's enough discussion on working with illustrator let's look at some other examples of why we might want to do some things with smart objects and why you might end up putting a smart object inside a smart object which sounds crazy but it actually there's times where it makes perfect sense so let's say that I'm doing something for a company whatever might be we want a more typical er font than that though let's pick something it's gonna be a little easier just to read okay so here's my tax I'm gonna stretch it a little bit in ways that aren't natural to see what's happened okay so in earlier lesson we talked about layer styles on one of those layer stiles is called stroke in a struggle automatically put a stroke around the outside of something and you can have different options for example the color I'm going to put it on centre and make it a little larger so you can see it maybe let's put it like three you can see there's a little stroke around the outside of it now let's imagine that I showed this to andrew's industrial company ink a ship with acne like in the bugs bunny cartoons but anyway uh I showed to them they say looks great but don't you love when you're showing something and said that's fantastic but or that's perfect but can you just and they look and they say oh that's great I love the little red stroke a little red liner on the outside cues and another stroke maybe a black another a little black line around and is a photo shop user we'd be tempted to say well no because you can only add one stroke two layer one stroke player style that isthe now there is a potential solution but frankly it's not the best one and that would be to do this make a new layer and then I'm gonna turn this into a selection by hitting commander control and you'll see it makes a selection then on this layer I could use a command called stroke and I could pick the color and do all those things but the problem with is is it's not tied to my type so if I edit my type to say something else you'll see the black isn't working so that's not gonna work I mean it could work but it would be more of a pain than anything else so the question is this if this type player already has a stroke how on earth could I give it another stroke and one of the ways to do that would be disabled what if I take this type player and converted to a smart object now my smart object contains type with a stroke but in a sense I have now reset the layer styles back to square one so I could say hope also now I should be able to add a stroke and we'll just put a stroke of black on the outside and now we're getting the look we want where you have a little bit of red and the black around the outside now the only trick to this is we have to imagine now if you're looked thinking of containers now we have a container inside a container since that whole russian dolls or tupperware stacked inside each other kind of scenario where now if I want to edit either the red stroke or the type I have to double click toe look at the contents and now I could do one of two things I could do more than one or two things but let's do this first of all they changed our company name now they didn't really but you know and I can say and they also wanted this to be uh yellow instead so that's updated this one now I save this and when I come back this other one it's updated so it's still the same principle of endit in that separate window but this is opening up down possibilities of things that we couldn't do easily before so and not two take it too far down the road but just so your mind starts thinking about some possibilities here now if they come back and say ooh let's add yet another stroke I know they probably wouldn't but just pretend well I could make this into a smart object at another strokes and I have three levels of containers inside each other I know it sounds a little mind boggling at first to do that but this is an example of how you can solve problems without having to do those nasty things like rast arise or merge or anything like that so this is the the thought process I would like you to go through when you're trying some situation or you run into some situation where your first thought is well I guess I'm gonna have to merge or flatten or rast arise or something like that this is one of the ways to work around it is putting smart objects inside of smart objects then you have to think I'm several levels deep to get to the point that you want okay let's look at another example here let's say I was going to create a graphic for a calendar and we're going to just do it this way where we're going to make a big word like this commercial use the three letter abbreviation is the word I was trying to think of three lower abbreviation for each month so let's quit out of illustrators that open anymore that okay so let's open these two other images and let's also get rid of some of our other windows I tend to have too many windows open for not confuse anyone including myself all right so what I want to do is use this photograph and have it show up inside these letters now if you're a subscriber to this class you'll know there was a bonus video on clipping masks but in case you didn't see that basically what it means I have a photograph on top but I want the photograph on ly to be visible inside the letter so I have a photo on top letters below and I'm going to do that clipping mask idea and now I can reposition this and decide where I want it to be now what I'd really like to have happen here is I'd liketo have this text have a nice cast shadow well photo shop we have the drop shadow layer style but that just looks like it's dropped it's not a cast chef so I want to come up with a way where I can create a cast shadow for this text but also do in such a way that for each other month I don't have to do that same operation over and over again so let's kind of think this through here so I've got my type looking the way that I want let's convert it to a smart object now let's duplicate that commander control j when you duplicate of course it's an exact copy well I want my shadow to be dark well I can't change I don't want to change the color of this because here's what would happen if I double clicked and change the color of this type the other one would changes well cause member I want them to be duplicates in this case so instead I'll use a layer style which is called color overlay I'm gonna overlay it with a very dark color in fact they could probably make it well let's just go with black okay so a simple way to tell it I need you to be black and set of the original color now look closely the layers panel you'll see ultimately it's still brown tax but I got this colored overlay on top of it now we're going to do a gaussian blur and not sure how much he had so let's just click okay for now so I need to restructure things a little bit because I actually have these in the wrong order this is actually the shadow and this is the layer that I want tohave the photograph inside of it like that then we'll hide these for a second what I really want this is to be a cast shadow I'm gonna click on this layer and use free transformed now if you haven't noticed before anytime you free transform a smart object that has a smart filter that filter temporarily goes away just so you can see what you're doing I hold down command or control and I'm gonna drag this to say I want my cash shadow to look like this and I'm going to kind of nudge it so the bottoms kind of match up and soon as I hit return it should automatically have my little cast shadow so now I've got this affect what I wanted I have the word october one that would look like if we added a slight beveled edge to it just hard well I think I like that okay so now I have the this effect I've got the letters I've got the photo we have clipped inside and I've got the effect of the shadow that I want I would very quickly very quickly save this as a pdf file because now even though I've done one month in effect I have once again created a template for every other month now the one thing that I didn't say which I should have thought of ahead of time is whenever you're creating a template like this that you're going to re use for different things if you're doing it for things like text pick even elise or all three letter abbreviations picked the widest one so I have to figure out which would be would it be feb or mar or enough for november whatever it might be so I may run to a bit of an issue here but we'll find out so I've saved this I've got my graphic for the month of october now it's time to move on and let's do december so I double click on either one of these because remember both of these are copies of the same smart object I double click on either one and I selected input december nicely fits as soon as I close and save it is gonna update this and all that remains to be done is to take our winter photograph and drag it in here make sure it's on top which it is and there we go now I've got december and I would save a copy of that now sometimes when I show an effect like this some people directions well that took a lot of upfront work well I wouldn't say a lot it took more thought process kind of figure out how can I achieve this in a way that's going to give me the inevitability I want through the smart object but you can see from now on to go to the next month it's literally two steps edit the type and then drag in the next month's photograph and then well three if you include save as but that's why we were always circling back to that discussion of psd file and non destructive is for reasons like this because now I can say all right well that's a really nice effect now all move on and do something else and they parts of this that throw people off and I must admit I had the same issue at first is I thought how can I if my original type unless myers type was black which I suppose it could have been because again is a clip as a when you're making a clipping mass like this it doesn't really matter the color but in this case since I had happen to start with brown I have to use the color overlay effect too get the black blurry text that I want now one other little thought for you that I could do whenever I see a cash shadow I like it better if the part further away is faded out more so in this case even though I have a smart filter I might also click on the type of smart object itself out of layer mask and then use the grady in tulle perhaps to kind of fade this just a little bit let's go do that and try this way maybe not quite that much how about like this that's better because real shadows tend to be darker closer and fade out further away and just to clarify even though I did that I can still go back and say yep I made a mistake I want to work on my october logo so I close and save it and it updates and at worst I might have to tweet the mask a little bit to get it toe look the way I want of course I need to have leaves again so that's kind of the idea of again why we do these things now let me show you one last example here and this is to me an interesting example that it's perhaps not an everyday situation but it kind of helps us work through a situation that that we might run into this kind of roadblock what do I do now so the scenario is working with someone and they want to simulate a ziff we have type on a three d globe now photoshopped does have three d ability but that's one part of photoshopped that to me is still somewhat mysterious I haven't really delved into the three decide so I'm not going to do it that way so let's see how else could I don't need this to be able to be rotated needs to look as if it's on a globe so I'm gonna have this bunch of techs here I'm goingto make a circular selection and click on the mask button and hopefully they would say yes that's exactly what we had in mind but clearly they wouldn't now because this is a type player I need to convert it to a smart object so I can start playing with filters but of course that means I've preserved the edit ability the text within this so now let's go to filter distort and there is an option called spear eyes which does a very nice job of making our text look mohr like it's on a globe on the nice things about smart filters as you khun do the same filter more than once so we're going to spear eyes the sphere eyes although probably not all the way but now we're doing kind of doubling up on a little bit so that's pretty cool looking the way that looks now at this point though I'm thinking that in order to make this looking moralistic I would love it if the very outer edges of this text was a little blurrier so if I go and do a gaussian blur and we'll just blur a little bit but what I want to do is tell a photo shop on ly blur the outer edges in other words don't blur here and here's where we run into one of the few drawbacks of smart filters there's on ly one mask for all these filters so as you'll see in a second the problem I run into is if I try to mask just the gazi and blur it's not gonna work here's what happens if I click on the smart filter mask and I take my paintbrush I've got a really nice big brush and as I start to see what happens it's not just masking the gazi and blur it's also masking the sphere I so that is not going to work so a new step backwards so what do I do well like that example I showed you with type with a stroke and I want to kind of reset and start again here's how I'd do it even though this is already a smart object with text I take this smart object and I converted to a smart object so now I've kind of reset right so now we do our goshen blur now on this mask I can decide this is kind of the effect that I want something like that that looks a lot better now to really take this a step further now we decide we need to sharpen this whole thing for prints well the same problem would apply if I did sharpen it would only sharpen the outer edges because I already have this big mask on it so believe it or not yet convert that to a smart object I know it gets kind of crazy but this is the way we do it now we can do our sharpening and again I've got over the top sharpening let's make it a little less so now it's ready for print I have done all this work I show my client and they say it looks fantastic but then they noticed await you capitalized question marks and it's not supposed to be capitalized uh okay how do I edit it well I have to look through my russian dolls or my stack of tupperware containers and let's look inside this smart object and you'll see there's another smart obvious why look inside that one and there's another one I look inside that one oh there's my text so now let's make an obvious edit you can't spell on his edit hoops all right just fix that here we go so now I commit this type I close and save this which updates the next one which I close and save which update this one which I close and safe and updates that one I know there's a least one person out there just like you like it but think about the alternative how else could I have done this I would have had to rast arise at some point or just said I can't do that and that's what I absolutely love about this ability is that very rarely do you ever run into a roadblock craig oh gosh darn it I can't do what I want to do without having to rast arise merge flattened erase all those nasty things so will you ever have to put five smart obvious insights fight smart obvious maybe not but you might now I had a situation I've told this story before but it's kind of my favorite story I was teaching a class on smart object and I did this kind of example where I had a whole bunch of smart objects embedded inside and someone in the audience shout out you must have loved the movie inception you haven't seen that movie it's all about dreams within dreams it's very confusing and I was like in fact I did and I love that movie because it made perfect sense to me dreams within dreams smart obviously this martin affects sure now is there some limit there's probably some technical limit as to how many smart objects deep you can go I've never run into it I've heard rumors once of someone in texas who tried to do twenty eight smart objects and their computer exploded there probably is some limit reality is most situations you'll be one or two levels deep maybe a little more but to me that the reason I show this is at least you know this possibility exists or if you're trying some raj ect and you suddenly go I don't know what to do here's a way around it so what I would suggest you do with after this lesson is take smart objects a step further try an example let's go back here and get to our example like this where you create some kind of layout where you've got multiple layers you put them all in there you've got them when the way you want them to take those layers and you turned them into a smart object so you can apply a filter like sharpen or something but then also still edit the original once you do that then I think it all kind of cemented together and you clicks and you go okay this is why the smart object workflow makes so much sense both from a productivity standpoint but also again I love this from a creativity standpoint because I know I can go down many many steps if I don't like it I'm not stuck I can always redo it so enjoy experimenting with smart smart filters will see you tomorrow