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Smart Objects in Photoshop

Lesson 10 from: Hot Tips from the Photoshop Playbook

Bryan ONeil Hughes

Smart Objects in Photoshop

Lesson 10 from: Hot Tips from the Photoshop Playbook

Bryan ONeil Hughes

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Lesson Info

10. Smart Objects in Photoshop

Next Lesson: HDR in Lightroom

Lesson Info

Smart Objects in Photoshop

we talk about smart objects a lot. How many you guys think you understand what's happening with a smart object? I'm not gonna ask you to explain, but how many of you feel like you have your head on that? Okay, that's representative. I'd say about about 1/3. Felt like they did for the people who don't. And for the people who do I want to show you a quick example. What's happening with a smart object? Why they're important, Why everyone should be using them. And then I'm gonna show you a crazy trick that you almost certainly don't know. So let's take this image here and by double click on the zoom tool and we come into 100%. There's tremendous detail here. Now, somewhere in your photo shop career, maybe when you're first starting out, you might have done something like this. This is 2400 pixels. And you wanted to make it smaller. Teoh emailed somebody. So maybe you made it 40. That was too small until you. Then he went back there and you said no, I didn't. I didn't mean that. I meant, um...

, you know, but it doesn't even though it started off a 24 you're going only to 1200. Before you did that, you made a 40. You threw away all that information and now you just have garbage. Um, there's nothing there we've all made. You guys don't have to cop to it, but we've all made this mistake somewhere along the line. And the difference with a smart object is it's always making a reference to the original. So if I take this and I come in here toe layer and I say smart objects convert to smart object and I say, Okay, let's make this 40 pixels. It's still gonna look like junk. It's 40 pixels. But the difference is if I come in here and I say, Not only do I want to make it 1200 but I want to make it 7000. It's ridiculous. It's gonna look amazing because it's calling on the original. So that's that's what's happening with a smart object. A smart object is a reference to the original file. They can be embedded, they can be linked. But what it's saying is, whatever I do to this check in with the original when I do it. So maybe it's that I'm applying a filter. Maybe it's that I'm re sizing it, but they're they're really, really powerful. Okay, So knowing that let's look at something that you might not know that you can do with them. Um, So it turns out that if you have multiple images in a smart object, you can do some pretty fancy filtering of the object. And so, uh, the work I'm about to show you is a way of removing Crufts, or noise or debris from images using a smart object workflow. So I'm gonna show you kind of a strange one, which is a very low light photos with an IPhone. What we're gonna do is we're gonna take these images here which, if we look at their noisy, they're low light. And I'm going to try to prove this theory of mine that using smart objects, uh, we can remove things from the images and make the images look better. So before I show it to you, imagine that you're taking ah photo shoot and a sand storm comes through and sand whips across the photo shoot. What you should be able to dio because you should build a bake these images together and say, Take out the stuff that's not in all of the images and the sand should just disappear. And we've proven that we did this cool workflow where we said, Hey, I took a bunch of pictures. People are moving all around the streets We filtered the smart objects and we removed the tourists because you're just sorting through the data and you're saying, Hey, if you don't, If content doesn't exist in half or more of the images, remove it. So I thought it'd be cool to test this with noise. Noise isn't the same in every image, so noise should be removed. If you pass multiple images through this filtering method, let me show you how it works. Essentially, what we're gonna dio is we're gonna take these images which, if you look at them closely, there's ever so slightly different, have essentially taken four different pictures of the same thing. Now, what I'm trying to show that you can do here is you could take whatever camera you happen to have with you, and you can create a better image simply by taking multiple images, right? I'm gonna clean this up and do more with it. So let's take these images. Let's do that trick we learned before, which is using these running out of tools. Photoshopped blowed files into Photoshopped layers. And if you recall the other way to do it, file scripts, files in the stack, get all of our images here we need to do is we need to align them. Okay, line them up. They're not too far off, but they're a little bit. And then what we're gonna dio is we're gonna create a smart object. It's gonna put a wrapper around all of them. Let's just get way in here. And what should happen is we should be able to get rid of some of this noise by filtering them and saying Show me the content of that image rapper That only exists in half or more of the images. So, in other words, if there's dust, if there's noise, it should go away. All right. So with Sezam didn't like that. So now because this is a smart object, I can come in here to stack mode. You probably didn't even know this is here. As far as I know, It's the only sub sub menu in Photoshop, and I've got all these scary math terms, and one of them is media. And if I run that, the noise disappears. So it's it's kind of interesting when you look at it as a lock. But imagine what you could do with this. You could take pictures of the night sky, and all of the moisture is gonna come out of it. You could take pictures with a really crappy camera, and it's going to take enough images. The quality is gonna get better because the subject matter is going to stay. But all the noise is gonna go away. You take picture are on a rainy day or snowy day, the rain and snow in different places. We have enough images. What's gonna happen is the building is going to stay there and you're gonna wash the snow and the rain away is a really interesting workflow. I don't have the most compelling demo assets, but I have proved that it works. Um, I'd love to see what some other people do with this one because I really think there's something to it. Um, it's funny, the tourist remover. It's also fun to just clean up images

Ratings and Reviews

Mike Thompson
 

I think this class was well worth it. I like that you are sharing this info, like the "secrets" so I can try them and have acquaintances ask, "how did you do that". It was great. Thanks!

user 12004e
 

Lots of good tips. Gets to some deeper aspects of the programs.

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