Photoshop® CS4 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Working with Smart Objects

In This Chapter

• Creating Smart Objects

• Converting Smart Objects

• Editing Smart Objects

With the advent of Smart Objects, Photoshop has significantly cut your editing time while letting you transform your objects indefinitely without fear of quality loss. That's right. Vector files, raster files — it doesn't matter to these intelligent fellows. And with Smart Objects, you create the art once, and then if you want to show the art again, you use what are called instances. These instances can be linked to your original art, which makes editing a breeze. This chapter tells you all about this feature — the ultimate in digital recycling.

Introducing Smart Objects

A Smart Object is actually what Adobe refers to as a container, in which a bitmap (raster) or vector image's source data is embedded. So, in essence, a Smart Object is composed of two files, one inside the other. Adobe uses the analogy of a new file, the child, which is embedded into the original file, the parent. This source data of the child is contained in the Smart Object parent but keeps all its native characteristics and is fully editable.

Here are a few advantages of Smart Objects:

• Transform with minimum degradation. In Book III, Chapter 3, I warn you about the negative side of transformations. When transforming traditional layers, your image goes through the process of resampling, which then ...