From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Design

Replacing the contents of a Smart Object - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Design

Start my 1-month free trial

Replacing the contents of a Smart Object

“

- [Instructor] This video picks up where my Photoshop Essential Training course leaves off. If you're unfamiliar with Smart Objects, please be sure to watch the two videos in the Smart Objects chapter in the Photoshop Essential Training, and then join us here. Throughout this course, I'll be hiding and showing different panels, displaying only those panels that are relevant to the topics that we're covering in the video. Now, there are a number of reasons that we might need to replace or change the contents of a Smart Object. Perhaps you're doing template work, and you need to swap out images. Or you're creating a design, and you are waiting for the high-res version or the final retouched photographs. Regardless, replacing the contents is very easy. So we have the clouds layer open, and I want to place an embedded file which will place it as a Smart Object. I'll choose File and then Place Embedded. Navigate to the 01 Smart Objects folder, and then place the mountains.jpg by double-clicking on it. Photoshop will automatically resize the placed image to fit within the document. So I'll going to ahead and click on the check mark to commit to that. There are three different preferences that control how Photoshop places images. If we choose our Preferences and then go to General, we can choose to always create a Smart Object when placing, as well as resize the image during place. You could always disable those if you didn't want them. I'm going to keep them on, as well as enable the Skip Transform when Placing. This is going to eliminate the need for me to always tap Enter or Return whenever I place a Smart Object. All right, let's go ahead and change the stacking order of the mountains in the background. I'll click on the lock icon in order to unlock it and then double-click and rename it Clouds. To reposition it, I'll drag it up above the Mountains in the Layers panel. Then to blend them together, I'll change the blend mode to Overlay, and I'll change the opacity to 50%. Now, on the Mountains layer, I want to transform it, so I'll choose cmd + t on Mac or ctrl + t on Windows, or you can choose Edit and then Free Transform. On Mac, you can use the Control-click or right-click to use the context-sensitive menus in order to flip this horizontally. I also just want to point out that when Photoshop scaled it down, we can see the amount that it resized it while placing it by looking at the width and height in the options bar. All right, let's apply that. And then I'm going to add a border by choosing Select All and then Select, Modify, and then Contract. And I'm going to contract the selection by 50 pixels and be sure to apply the effect at the canvas bounds. Then at the bottom of the Layers panel, I'll click the add layer mask icon to create our mask. So at this point, we've done some work, but let's say we need to replace the mountain image. I can either right-click on the Mountains layer in the Layers panel and choose to replace the contents, or we can use the menu item, Layer, and then Smart Objects, and then Replace Contents. I want to replace it with this branches image, but I want to point out that the tallest branch is on the left-hand side. When I click Place, Photoshop will apply the same transformations to the replaced image as it did the originals so the tallest branches are now on the right side. So not only are the transformations kept, but also the layer mask and other work that we've done to the image. So for example, if I had included this in a group or created a clipping mask or added a vector mask, all of that would remain in place as well. So as your files get more complicated, replacing the contents of a Smart Object is a great-time-saver, especially if you're working with other people on a design and you don't have final artwork. One thing I want to mention, if you do have different size originals that you're replacing, you might have to resize them when you replace the contents. But because they're Smart Objects, all of the transformations are non-destructive. So there you go, an easy way to quickly swap out the contents of a Smart Object in Photoshop.

Contents