Working with Smart Objects in Photoshop

- Hi. I want to show you something. I've got this image here that I shot. If you're wondering why the horizon is all curvy, that's because I shot it with a fish eye lens. And I liked that effect. I feel like it, I don't know, exaggerated horizon adds something to the image but this image doesn't look immediately fish eye to me. But it needs a lot of work. I was attracted by the relationship between this rock and this tree and the fact that there's this kind of hump of dirt here. Actually now that I look at it, it looks like a shallow grave.

I hope that's not what it is. Anyway, whatever it is, it creates a line between these two objects. So, I need to exaggerate that. I just generally need to get this image in order. I'm here in Light Room. I'm gonna start with a crop because I don't think I did a great job of framing this. I need to take a little bit here off the bottom and the side. So I'm just gonna grab the crop tool. The computer's being slow for some reason. There we go. I would like to preserve the original aspect ratio so I'm gonna set that to as shot. And crop that into more about here. Now, when I shot this, I really did a, I'd say I did a very good job of putting that rock right there on the third intersection.

It's just too bad that in this particular image, that's actually not great composition. So, whoa. I'm gonna do this instead. That rotation that happened there was because I'm using a track pad that can pick up rotation with a pinching motion. So if I take that, this just feels better to me. It cuts out some of that extra space. But we need a lot of tonal work here. Now, normally, the first place I would start is the sky. But I'm thinking of this image as a black and white image that's gonna be very high key and pretty dramatic. So I'm gonna leave the sky blown out right now.

What I'm mostly worried about is getting the foreground a lot more texturey. I'm gonna put some of the blacks down. I'm gonna increase some clarity. All raw images always need a boost in clarity. And this is pretty good. But I want to do the rest in Photoshop. I need to do a lot of localized edits here and I just don't like Light Room for localized edits look because the brush tools aren't as refined and also because of the way the histogram works. So I'm gonna take this into Photoshop. Now normally to go into Photoshop, I can just hit alt or command + E in Light Room to start a round trip process into Photoshop.

That will render the image as a tif file. This is a raw file. It will render it as a tif file and pass that tif to Photoshop. But I'm gonna do something different this time. I'm going to, this is the subject for our Practicing Photographer this week, I'm going to move this image into Photoshop as a smart object. There's no keyboard shortcut for that. I go up to photo, edit in, open as smart object in Photoshop. So now, it's doing some work behind the scenes and it's passing a different type of file to Photoshop.

A raw file has no actual usable pixel data in it. It's just a bunch of data that has to be interpreted by the raw converter in Light Room or whatever application I'm using before I can see actual full color. So normally, if I'm working with a raw file, when I'm in Light Room and say, "Hand this to Photoshop." It does that rendering and saves it as a tif file and passes that tif to Photoshop. When I open as a smart object, here I am in Photoshop, it gives me a Photoshop document and it looks like a rendered tif file but you can see my title up here is the file name as smart object dash one at 33% and it's telling me the color profile and bit depth.

There's no file extension here. This is not a tif file. It's something else. And here's a clue as to what it is. Down here on the layers palette, the icon for this particular layer has an extra little document badge on it. That means that this is a smart object. And we'll see what that means in just a moment. Let me get started on some of my edits. I'm gonna first convert to black and white with a normal black and white adjustment layer. I don't have a lot of color in this image. There's not a lot to work with there. But I can get some toning out of the sky.

Just barely cause there is some blue there. Mostly this needs a lot of contrast work. So I'm gonna start with levels adjustment. And as I said, I was thinking this as a high key image so I'm gonna just blast my contrast up here. And I don't want to blow out the sky any more than it already is. I'm gonna just really overexpose the foreground. And now I'm going to fill the mask of this adjustment layer with black and then paint in with white to constrain the effect to just this area.

If you don't really understand this technique, you can learn a lot more about it in many different places in the library including my Ink Jet Printing for Photographers course. Okay, this is kind of cool. The sky's bugging me though. It was a nice sky that day. I'm not sure that the blown out thing works. And the blown out sky only works if I blow out stuff in the foreground. I need the sky to look intentionally blown out which means I need a lot of, a lot of highlights in the image blown out. And when I do that, look at the rock. It's lost all sorts of detail.

Maybe I'm just too persnickety but this doesn't look like a stylized form of high key overexposed image. It just looks like someone who doesn't know what they're doing. And I don't want to look like that. I'm gonna turn off this levels adjustment layer for now. So normally, if I had rendered this as a tif file and brought it into Photoshop through the normal round trip process, I would have to just close this image and forget about it. Go back to Light Room, fix the sky, and then move that into Photoshop. But that's not what I did. I brought this in here as a smart object.

If I now go down here to the smart object in my layers palette and double click on it. And wait. Shouldn't have to wait that long. There we go. Here I am in camera raw now. So camera raw is the same raw processing engine that Light Room uses. So I'm just back to the raw level. I've got my raw file here, I've got all my normal raw sliders, which means I've got highlight recovery which means I can put the sky right back where it needs to be. Look at all that sky that's there. Mm, sky.

There's all sorts of detail in there. And I can do the same. Expand some of the contrast in the shadows. So here I am just working with my normal raw edits. Just as if I was back in Light Room. Now when I hit okay, it does some stuff to my smart object, and updates my document here in Photoshop. Boom, there's my sky as I processed it in Light Room. But look, the image is already black and white because all of the layers that I stacked on top of it are still working. My black and white layer is there.

I don't have to redo any of the work that I did before. Except I have to redo some of the work that I did before because it turns out now that my blue adjustment is too strong, given the changes that I made in camera raw. But still, my point is sound. This was much faster and much easier. Now if I turn my levels adjustment back on, I can come down here and tone it down to put detail back on the rock. Aha! Ooh, this is working much better. Look at that sky. That's a good menacing sky in front of my menacing dead tree and what may or may not be a shallow grave in the foreground.

So I'm gonna set these back to where they should be, at that good contrast here. That's a good general overall level of contrast for the foreground. I want to make a secondary adjustment here. I think there's a way that I can bring out some interesting texture on the foreground. I'm about to give up on trying to make that little hump of dirt look bigger or more humpy than it was. I'd been thinking I could paint some shadows along it to exaggerate it some, but I don't think there's enough detail there. But these bits of dirt in here, I can make them brighter just to make the ground more interesting.

So now what I'm thinking is this looks good. I think maybe I wasn't aggressive enough of my sharpening. This should be an image with a lot of crunch to it. So I wish that I had made a better clarity adjustment. Well, it's a smart object. I can. Clarity is a raw processing function so if I just come back here, I can pull my clarity up even further. Hit okay to come back into Photoshop. I am moving freely between raw processing and editing in Photoshop. So it's really just like working in Light Room except I've got the full suite of Photoshop tools.

Or do I? Let's say that I wanted to remove this stick right here. Well, normally, that would be a simple cloning operation. But if I select the clone tool, or rubber stamp tool, I get this circle with a slash through it implying no, it's the universal sign for no cloning here. So what's that about? Why can't I do that? Well, this is a smart object. It is not a layer full of pixels. This is a raw file. It's a raw file that's embedded in my document. And raw files don't actually contain pixel data. So before I can do anything to this, I need to rasterize it.

Meaning I need to take it through that process of converting it from a raw file into an actual set of pixels. If I do that, I will lose the ability to go back and make raw changes. So I think what I'm gonna do is rather than rasterize this smart object, I'm gonna duplicate the smart object first. If I right click on it and say new smart object via copy, I will get a copy of it. It's important to remember that you have to do this to duplicate a smart object, not duplicate layer. If I say duplicate layer, I will get two copies of the same smart object and any change I make to one will be made to the other.

Now I have two smart objects. I'm gonna right click on this one and say rasterize layer. And that little badge disappears. Now this is a normal layer. I can grab my clone tool and clone out that stick. Oh, that completely changes the image. Obviously that was just for the sake of an example here. So, smart objects are a way of maintaining the raw level of editing that I get in camera raw or Light Room while being in the full Photoshop environment with all of my adjustment layers, cloning tools and things there.

One thing you can do with this stacking of smart objects feature, or stacking of smart objects and rasterized smart objects feature, if I create a layer mask here, I can fill it with black. Look, my stick came back. Because now my edited layer is being completely masked. I can paint white into that layer to reveal just the edited part of that upper layer. Now if I go back and make changes to my smart object, they will actually appear in my final image everywhere but in that little bit that I painted out.

So there's a way that even after rasterizing a layer and doing stuff, here, I'm just going to do an extreme example here. Even after doing these kinds of changes, rasterized changes, I can still go back and get some raw functionality. You don't even notice that that's painted out. Oh, I guess you do. But it actually looks kind of natural. So this is a way that I can keep access to raw editing while doing all of my normal Photoshop editing. You can also get smart objects out of camera raw in the same way that you do in Light Room. So a very, very good way to improve your work flow and allow you to keep such raw features as white balance adjustment and highlight recovery without having to give up all of the great stuff that I have in Photoshop.