Lessons

Lesson Info

Multiple Instances of a Smart Object

Now let's take a look at the concept of multiple instances of the exact same smart object. We saw just a hint of it when we worked with a raw file. Remember when I just use standard commands to duplicate a layer? How If I'd made a change to one smart object, the other one updated? Well, let's see how that could be a useful feature in this document. I have drawn two layers here. I drew a base, which is just a circle, and after making that circle, I added a drop shadow so that if I turn off the drop shadow, you can see that it's gone. Then, above that, I ended up drawing this polygon. Now both of those could be drawn using what's known as the Shape tools, and we had a lesson in the ultimate guide that covered the use of the shape tools. And I ended up making a complex gear. But this is just using two of these particular tools. I simply drew an ellipse on one layer, and I drew a polygon on the other. So I'm gonna select those two layers, and I'm gonna turn them into a smart object that's ...

gonna look as if those two layers get merged into one. It still has access to the individual layers, though I just need to double click in the layer. To get them to show up is a separate document. Now I'm gonna end up duplicating that layer multiple times. You can duplicate it any way you like, as long as I don't use the command we used on the raw file that made the other layer independent. Now, a quick way of duplicating a layer is when you're using the move tool and you click and drag to move a layer. If you hold down the option key, that's all time Windows. You're gonna move a copy. And so here. I just made a copy. Then I'm gonna select both of the layers that have bolts in them in my layers panel and with move tool again, I'm gonna hold down the option key once again to make another set of copies. And if you want to, we could make a ridiculous number just by holding option. Each time a drag on dragging out a bunch of these. That's a panel that's really bolted down. Well, now, if you look in our layers panel, you're going to see a whole bunch of layers, each one of them. Except for that bottom. Most layer is a smart object. Now I'm gonna double click on any one of those layers on its thumbnail image. It doesn't matter which of the layers, because they're all point back to the same original contents. When I double click on the thumbnails with layer, that contents appears. It's its own layer, and that's where I can see it. Here. I can tell that it's just a little circle and a polygon above it. We could find Tune it. Maybe I add some additional, um, styles a bevel in bossed around the edge, a little Grady int overlay to add some shading, maybe on my polygon. I come in here and add a little edging on there with some bevel in and boss in some other things. Those are just things I had turned off, but I could have just added them by coming down here and say they want to add Bevel in and Boston such. Anyway, I just updated that. Now I'm going to come in here and I'm just gonna close this. And when I close it since I made changes, its gonna ask if I want to save them. I'll say, yes, save them and it's going to save them back to where they came from. Where they came from is wherever I double clicked to get this document to appear, which means it's going to go back into the layer that it came from. In all of these, just updated. If I choose undo, you'll see what they used to look like. And then I'll reapply and you can see the update. So therefore, if you ever want to use an element multiple times in a document in later on, you might want to update that element. You might want to change its contents, changes color or anything else. If you end up turning into a smart object before you duplicate to use it in multiple areas of the image, you're gonna have much more versatility. We'll show you another example of that. Let's say you're doing Web design. Here's your interface. You're gonna have to navigate your website, and you see you have those little circles that are kind of like little bullets. Ah, to indicate where your your various options Well, if you made one of those and you turn it into a smart object before you duplicated it to do the others which was done here, then you should be able to take one of those layers like this one. Do you see the one that's turning on and off in double click on his thumb now and then you're going to see that as a separate document. There it is. Well, I'm gonna go over to the other document. We were working on this one, and I'm going to double click on one of these layers. So I just gonna grab these two pieces and I'll use my move tool, drag it over to this document and put it in there. It's a little on the large side, so I might type command T for transform is getting to be inappropriate size press returner. Enter and then hide the layer that contains the original piece. I'm gonna close that. Tell it yes. Save the difference. Save that. And we'll close the When I took it from Now, let's return and see what we have. Look, they're all now little bolts sense. It was in a different position. It wasn't centered in the document. It got moved up a little bit. Here. They're still in the same position. It's just before the object was centered in the document, and when I was done, it was higher in the documents. So all we need to do here is grab all those layers and use the arrow keys to move down with my move toward. I could do the same thing with these tabs as long as when I made one tab, I turned it into a smart object before duplicating it to create the others. And that was the case here. If I double click on this, there's my tab, and that's how it is made out of just a shape with a bunch of layer styles on it. But I could changed its appearance here, and then if I close this in, save the changes, all of them walked it. But what if I only wanted one of them to update? Well, that's when I need to come in here and choose layer smart objects. New smart object via copy, which means make a smart object that is independent of the existing ones. I would do that and then I would throw away the layer that it was made from, so that now that one of the left is completely independent, I can double click on its thumb now, and I'll turn back on those styles, close it and save it. And now you can see that only one of them changed. And that's because I took only one of them in said New Smart object via copy. I threw away the layer that that new smart object was generated from, and now that one's independent of the others. So they're all sorts of uses for this you could end up. If you do make advertisements, you're going a coupon border around it. You start off with just dashes in your coupon border. We'll just make one dash, turn into a smart object and then carefully duplicated and space it out all the way around your document. Later on, the next week, you decide I want to have stars all the way around. All you have to do is double click on the thumbnail for that layer, replaced the dash with a small star. Suddenly, they all update. There's all sorts of uses for that, but it's known as multiple instances of the same smart object. All right, Now let's look at how I took that to different Another level. Ah, here. I'm gonna turn off a bunch of layers to show you just one layer. This single layer was created using the shape tools. I demonstrated how to use the shape tools in a separate lesson. That was about the tools and panels in federal shop. So if you haven't seen that lesson, you might want to refer to it. And then this was just a solid color, and it only has some effects applied to it to give it a special look. If I turn off the effects, you can see it's just a boring solid color to change its basic color. I went down to the letters FX, and there's a choice called color overlay in that color overlay. I chose red, and that's what made it look red. I'm gonna turn all these on to show it to you, though. Okay? There's the red. Then I went back to the same menu and I decided to add a drop shadow. There it is. Then I decided to add bevel in boss and something else called satin. That's what makes it look special. Now what if, before adding all of those settings to this instead, Back when it looked like the simple shape, I turned it into a smart object. Well, if that's the contents of the smart object and then the outside of the smart object, I added those of facts, then those effects can easily be changed. Then I end up taking this, and I duplicated I could just type command J. That's one way of duplicating, and then I can transform it with free transform. And I think in one of the other lessons and the complete guide, I should you how you could rotate something. What if I were to rotate this until that little hook around the edge here seem to wrap right around right there, and I pressed Returner entered Sam done. Then there's a way to get it to do that again and again. I could repeat this. I've already done that, which is what created all of these pieces, and I showed that process where you can duplicate and you can rotate from from the middle of the document. Instead, the middle of the object in the lesson that had to do with tools and panels. So if you need more about how to do that, feel free. That's not really when I I want to show. You just need to talk a little bit about the set up for this document now, since I am had a shape, and I turned it into a smart object before I duplicated it before I rotated it all. That rotation and other changes are going to be retained. If I come in here and just double click on the thumbnail for that layer, there's the original shape. If I come in and use this little arrow tool that's known as the direct selection tool, I could select part of this. You see about changing it in. If I close it and save it, it just updated every single one of those I'll choose undo before after, so it just makes it so you can push it to an extreme if you want. Teoh and I did it when I created some pieces of interesting kind of art with this because it allowed me to create something this and to make fine tune adjustments like, for instance, here, if you see how this particular piece looks almost like it's wrapping right around that edge, and this looks like it's almost going perfectly around that well, that's because I was able to adjust it and have all these update and just do it multiple times until I got it to be exactly the way I wanted to. Then, after I was done with that, I made it look like these were woven as if this piece went above here and then underneath and above, underneath and above and so on. But I showed that in the layer mass lesson. So it's only if you get the full complete guide that you'll learn how to do all that stuff.