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Smart Object Basics

Lesson 64 from: Adobe Photoshop CC Bootcamp

Blake Rudis

Smart Object Basics

Lesson 64 from: Adobe Photoshop CC Bootcamp

Blake Rudis

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Lesson Info

64. Smart Object Basics

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Bootcamp Introduction

16:22
2

The Bridge Interface

13:33
3

Setting up Bridge

06:55
4

Overview of Bridge

11:29
5

Practical Application of Bridge

27:56
6

Introduction to Raw Editing

11:00
7

Setting up ACR Preferences & Interface

07:39
8

Global Tools Part 1

16:44
9

Global Tools Part 2

20:01
10

Local Tools

22:56
11

Introduction to the Photoshop Interface

07:13
12

Toolbars, Menus and Windows

25:07
13

Setup and Interface

11:48
14

Adobe Libraries

05:57
15

Saving Files

07:39
16

Introduction to Cropping

12:10
17

Cropping for Composition in ACR

04:44
18

Cropping for Composition in Photoshop

12:40
19

Cropping for the Subject in Post

03:25
20

Cropping for Print

07:34
21

Perspective Cropping in Photoshop

07:11
22

Introduction to Layers

08:42
23

Vector & Raster Layers Basics

05:05
24

Adjustment Layers in Photoshop

27:35
25

Organizing and Managing Layers

15:35
26

Introduction to Layer Tools and Blend Modes

21:34
27

Screen and Multiply and Overlay

09:15
28

Soft Light Blend Mode

07:34
29

Color and Luminosity Blend Modes

12:47
30

Color Burn and Color Dodge Blend Modes

07:43
31

Introduction to Layer Styles

11:43
32

Practical Application: Layer Tools

13:06
33

Introduction to Masks and Brushes

04:43
34

Brush Basics

09:22
35

Custom Brushes

04:01
36

Brush Mask: Vignettes

06:58
37

Brush Mask: Curves Dodge & Burn

06:53
38

Brush Mask: Hue & Saturation

07:52
39

Mask Groups

05:52
40

Clipping Masks

04:11
41

Masking in Adobe Camera Raw

07:06
42

Practical Applications: Masks

14:03
43

Introduction to Selections

05:42
44

Basic Selection Tools

17:41
45

The Pen Tool

11:56
46

Masks from Selections

04:22
47

Selecting Subjects and Masking

07:11
48

Color Range Mask

17:35
49

Luminosity Masks Basics

12:00
50

Introduction to Cleanup Tools

07:02
51

Adobe Camera Raw

10:16
52

Healing and Spot Healing Brush

14:56
53

The Clone Stamp Tool

10:20
54

The Patch Tool

06:38
55

Content Aware Move Tool

04:56
56

Content Aware Fill

06:46
57

Custom Cleanup Selections

15:42
58

Introduction to Shapes and Text

13:46
59

Text Basics

15:57
60

Shape Basics

07:00
61

Adding Text to Pictures

09:46
62

Custom Water Marks

14:05
63

Introduction to Smart Objects

04:37
64

Smart Object Basics

09:13
65

Smart Objects and Filters

09:05
66

Smart Objects and Image Transformation

10:57
67

Smart Objects and Album Layouts

11:40
68

Smart Objects and Composites

10:47
69

Introduction to Image Transforming

04:34
70

ACR and Lens Correction

09:45
71

Photoshop and Lens Correction

14:26
72

The Warp Tool

11:16
73

Perspective Transformations

20:33
74

Introduction to Actions in Photoshop

09:27
75

Introduction to the Actions Panel Interface

05:06
76

Making Your First Action

03:49
77

Modifying Actions After You Record Them

11:38
78

Adding Stops to Actions

04:01
79

Conditional Actions

07:36
80

Actions that Communicate

25:26
81

Introduction to Filters

04:38
82

ACR as a Filter

09:20
83

Helpful Artistic Filters

17:08
84

Helpful Practical Filters

07:08
85

Sharpening with Filters

07:32
86

Rendering Trees

08:20
87

The Oil Paint and Add Noise Filters

15:08
88

Introduction to Editing Video

06:20
89

Timeline for Video

08:15
90

Cropping Video

03:34
91

Adjustment Layers and Video

05:25
92

Building Lookup Tables

07:00
93

Layers, Masking Video & Working with Type

15:11
94

ACR to Edit Video

06:10
95

Animated Gifs

11:39
96

Introduction to Creative Effects

06:08
97

Black, White, and Monochrome

18:05
98

Matte and Cinematic Effects

08:23
99

Gradient Maps and Solid Color Grades

12:20
100

Gradients

04:21
101

Glow and Haze

10:23
102

Introduction to Natural Retouching

05:33
103

Brightening Teeth

10:25
104

Clean Up with the Clone Stamp Tool

08:07
105

Cleaning and Brightening Eyes

16:58
106

Advanced Clean Up Techniques

24:47
107

Introduction to Portrait Workflow & Bridge Organization

14:47
108

ACR for Portraits Pre-Edits

21:27
109

Portrait Workflow Techniques

18:46
110

Introduction to Landscape Workflow & Bridge Organization

12:17
111

Landscape Workflow Techniques

37:36
112

Introduction to Compositing & Bridge

06:59
113

Composite Workflow Techniques

34:01
114

Landscape Composite Projects

24:14
115

Bonus: Rothko and Workspace

05:15
116

Bonus: Adding Textures to Photos

07:05
117

Bonus: The Mask (Extras)

05:18
118

Bonus: The Color Range Mask in ACR

04:54

Lesson Info

Smart Object Basics

Here we are in Adobe Camera Raw, and this is a follow along image that you can open up and follow along with me on this as well. If I were to go ahead and just say, let's change this to auto, and then let's go. I hit the Auto button quite a bit in Adobe Camera Raw, and there's a reason. It used to be horrible, and when you used to press Auto it would just blow your image out and make it really nasty. But now when you press Auto, it's doing a really good job of assessing the dynamic range that is available within your image, and it actually makes a pretty darn good starting point for a photo. So I'm just kind of playing around here. I'm just gonna set this to auto, and then go ahead and maybe increase that clarity a little bit to make it a little bit more grungy, and then bump up that vibrance a little bit. If I go ahead and press Open Image, I'm gonna commit this to go into Photoshop, and become a typical background layer that is essentially rastered, as we've seen before. But if I do ...

this cool little thing and press Shift, you see how it says Open Object? It's not opening an image anymore. It's gonna alter the state of this from being a raster-based photo, and pull it into Photoshop as a Smart Object. So we're gonna go ahead and just press Shift, and open this object into Photoshop. What you're gonna notice here is that instead of this opening up as a regular background layer, it's gonna open up with what looks like a little layer here, like a tearaway layer, with a little box that pops out of it. What that's telling me is that this is a smart object. At any time, if I want to, I can double-click on that picture there, that little preview. I can double-click on it, and it pops me back into Adobe Camera Raw, and allows me to apply any of my settings here, and change them. Let's say I was like, you know what, I really don't like that clarity boost that I did. It's a little bit too much. I can come down here and I can drop that clarity boost, and now if I press Okay, notice how it doesn't say Open Object anymore, 'cause what it's doing, it's just opening up those settings that I had before. If I press okay and commit to that, it's now gonna go ahead and open me up into Photoshop, still have the Smart Object little icon down there, but I don't have that clarity boost that I had before. The thing to understand about using Smart Objects in Adobe Camera Raw, though, is that if I were to go ahead and add, let's say a gradient map, to do a traditional black and white. If this did not get set to black and white on your machine, just go ahead and click up here to your gradient, make sure it's set from black to white, press Okay. So we've got a black and white layer on top of our Smart Object now, right? If I were to go ahead and double-click on the Smart Object, you're gonna notice something. It doesn't bring in that black and white data. So it is smart, it's smart in that it knows what those settings were from before, but it's not necessarily smart enough to calculate all the stuff that's happening above it. So if you do any curves adjustment layers, if you do any gradient maps, it's not gonna calculate that stuff and show you what would happen if you changed the effects here. So if I were to increase the highlights here, and increase the contrasts here, and press Okay, we're just going to see that increased highlight and increase contrast boost underneath those gradient maps. But we're not gonna be able to really see the effect of what we're doing, when we do that. That's really important to understand, because if you do something like this, if you go and add a curves adjustment layer here, and you do some of that contrast boosting to this, which is very similar to what we did before, and we double-click inside here, open this up, and bring that contrast and those highlights down, press Okay, we aren't going to curves adjustment layers. But that curves adjustment layer is altering the state of what's happening on that Smart Object. Because remember, it's a build-up from what's happening on top, and working it's way down. We don't see all the stuff that's happening up here if we double-click and go back into there. So yes, it's smart. You can always go back and re-do your settings, but there's still gonna be some type of intuitive decisions that you're gonna have to make during that process, when you're thinking about, okay, I have that curves adjustment layer that's boosting my contrast. So if I go back into these settings and I boost that contrast, it's gonna make more contrast, and maybe you don't want that. So then you have to go into that curve and maybe just drop this down a little bit, and bring this down a little bit. One thing that we do have to talk about here before we move onto the rest of Smart Objects, is that you would think this is awesome. Everything I do can be saved within that smart object. I'm just going to do Smart Object processing from here on out, that's all I'm gonna do is Smart Objects. Kudos to you if you want to do that. That's awesome. There's two little problems that happen with Smart Objects, and we'll just get this out of the way now, before we go any further. The one problem that happens is Photoshop has to think about everything that's happening on this layer as you're working on it, so Smart Objects tend to slow your machine down. Specifically if you're doing a filter on a Smart Object, those filters will take a lot more time to process, because they're processing on a Smart Object. When you go back and you adjust those settings, it just takes a lot more time. It can be a very time-consuming process. With something like this, not really at all because we've got two layers on top of a regular, Smart Object. It won't take much time to process at all for it to process anything that's happening here. We start getting into layer stacks that might have 15, 20, 30, 40 different layers in them, and now you start adding filters in there, and multiple Smart Objects in there? Forget about it. It's just going to be a very slow, tedious process. The other drawback to having a Smart Object, is that a Smart Object is going to add more data to the saved file. Now, sometimes that data is negligible, but I will tell you this, that data is exponential. The DNG file that we're working on right now is not very big. If I were to go up here and go to File, and go to Save As, and save this as a PSD with all of these layers, and has the Smart Object there. Let's just go ahead and call this Smart Example, and then go over to Lessons, and make sure I save it into the right folder, Smart Objects, and we'll add a new folder here, and we'll call it Test Saves. This is the smart example, we'll even put a, I am still a little psycho about this, 01, so it becomes the first one. Press Okay. So that's basically saving this out as a PSD file, it has these layers in it, plus it also has all the smart capabilities built into it as well. If I don't want this to be a Smart Object anymore, and I want to commit to all the changes that I made, if I click on that layer, and I right-click, I'm now gonna go from a vector-based Smart Object, to a raster-based normal pixel layer, and rasterize that layer, and it no longer has the smart capabilities. Notice how if I try to double-click on this, all it does is bring up my layer styles. It's not gonna bring up Adobe Camera Raw anymore, it's gonna bring up Layer Styles. So if I go to File, I go to Save As, and I save this as a PSD, and we'll call it 02, and then Non-Smart Example, press Okay. And then if we were to look into the actual folder there and look at those file sizes. The non-smart example is 45.8 megabytes. Not very big. This one is 51.3 megabytes. It's 6 megabytes bigger just because of that smart data that's in there. I told you that this seems negligible, because this is a small file size, but let's say you've got your Nikon D810's with the big sensors in them, or your Sony a7R III's, where the file starts out as 42 megapixels, 42 megabytes, I should say. Roughly between 42 and 45 megabytes. Then you start stacking on layers, then you start stacking on Smart Objects. Then you start stacking on multiple Smart Objects, and multiple layers. If it has a Smart Object in it, it could be the difference of a one-gig file, literally, I have some landscape images that are one gig, from my Sony a7R III, that are PSD files that have all the layers in them. It could be the difference of a one-gig file, and a 1.5-gig file. 500 whole megabytes, just because I have a Smart Object or two in there. Because it's such a big file to begin with, it's got a bunch of information in it. That's definitely important to understand, that while these things are great, we do have to kind of take them with a grain of salt, that we can't do everything under the sun with them that we could possibly want to, we're still gonna have to take in mind that there are some drawbacks, and those drawbacks are it's gonna slow down our machine if we don't have a whole lot of RAM in our computer, and number two, it's gonna take up a lot more space on our computer. If you want to commit to those things, you just go ahead and right-click Rasterize, and then save it down so you don't have all of that smart data that's available in there.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Photoshop Bootcamp Plug-In
Textures
Clouds
Painted Backgrounds
1 – Intro to Photoshop Bootcamp
6 – Intro to Raw Editing.zip
11 – Interface and Setup
16 – Intro to Cropping and Composition.zip
22 – Intro to Layers.zip
26 – Intro to Layer Tools.zip
43 – Intro to Selections.zip
50 – Intro to Cleanup Tools.zip
58 – Intro to Shapes and Text.zip
63 – Intro to Smart Objects.zip
69 – Intro to Image Transforming.zip
74 – Intro to Actions.zip
81 – Filters.zip
88 – Intro to Editing Video.zip
96 – Custom Effects.zip
102 – Natural Retouching.zip
107 – Intro to Portrait Workflow.pdf
110 – Intro to Landscape Workflow.zip
112 – Intro to Compositing.zip
115 – Rothko and Interfaces (Bonus Video).zip
33 – Intro to Masks and Brushes.zip
106 - Frequency Separation.zip

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Amazing course, but don't be fooled into thinking this is a beginner's course for photographers. The problem isn't Blake's explanations; they're top. The problem is the vast scope of this course and the order in which the topics are presented. Take layers for example. When I was first learning Photoshop (back when we learned from books), I found I learned little or nothing from, for example, books that covered layers before they covered how to improve/process photographs. These books taught me how to organize, move, and link layers before they showed me what a layer was actually for. Those books tended to teach me everything there is to know about layers (types of layers, how to organize them, how to move them, how to move them two at a time, how to move them two at a time even if there are other layers between the two you're interested in, useful troubleshooting tips, etc. ) all before I even know (from a photographer's point of view) what it is the things actually do. The examples of organizing, linking, and moving mean everything for graphic designers from Day One, but for photographers not so much. Blake does the same thing as those books. Topics he covers extremely early demand a lot of theoretical imagination for a photographer who doesn't already know quite a bit about what he is talking about. Learning about abstract things first and concrete things later only makes PS that much harder to understand. If you AREN'T a beginner, however, this course is amazing. I thought it would be like an Army Bootcamp, taking you from zero and building you into a fit, competent Photoshop grunt. Now I think it's more like Army Bootcamp for high school varsity jocks. It isn't going to take you from the beginning, but the amount you'll get out of it is nonetheless more than your brain can imagine. I've been using PS for years to improve my photographs, and even to create the odd artistic composite or two. The amount I've learned in the first week is amazing, and every day I learn something -- more like many things -- which I immediately implement to improve my productivity and/or widen the horizons of what I can achieve. If you ARE a photographer who's a Photoshop beginner, I'd take very seriously the advice Blake gives in the introduction: Watch one lesson, and practice the skills and principles you learn in that one lesson for two weeks. THEN watch the next lesson. You can't do that of course without buying the course, so it's up to you to decide whether you'd like to learn Photoshop and master Photoshop all from the same course. Learning it first and mastering it later will cost more money, but I think you'll understand everything better and have a much more enjoyable ride in the process. As for me? I'm going to have to find the money to buy this course. There is simply way too much content in each lesson for me to try to take on all at once, but on the other hand I don't want to miss anything at all that he has to share.

Robert Andrews
 

Blake Rudis is the absolute best in teaching photoshop. His knowledge and how he presents the instruction is clear and concise - there is NO ONE BETTER. Yes, his classes require some basic skills, and maybe I'd organize the order of (or group) the classes in a different order, but, let me be clear - if anyone is to be successful or famous in the Photoshop world, it should be Blake Rudis. I strongly recommend his teaching. I started photography and post processing in 2018, and because of this class, I'm know what Im doing. The energy you get when you create something beautiful is profound, it makes you bounce out of bed (at 4AM) like a 5 year old, to go create. It's a great ride! Thanks Blake, & Thanks Creative live.

Esther Gambrell
 

WOW!!! I've been purchasing CL classes for several years now and have watched HOURS of "How-To Photoshop" classes, but this is the first one I've actually purchased because of the AWESOME BONUS content!!! SERIOUSLY??!!?!? A PLUG-IN??? But not only that, Blake is SO easy to understand, and he breaks down concepts in different ways to connect with different people's learning styles. I REALLY appreciated this approach because I am a LEFT-BRAINED creative that has an engineering background, so I really connected to what Blake was saying. THANK YOU FOR THAT! There are TONS of Photoshop courses out there, but I found this one to be the most helpful in they way Blake teaches concepts so that you know WHY you're doing what your doing. I feel like he taught me how to fish with Photoshop to feed me for a lifetime instead of just giving me a fish to feed me for one day. This is the BEST overall PS course out there!!! Thank you!!!!

Student Work

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