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Using Smart Objects and Smart Filters in Photoshop

This Article Features Photo Zoom

Photographers have come to love the nondestructive editing of programs like Adobe's Lightroom and Apple's Aperture, as well as most RAW processors. The beauty of nondestructive editing is that you can make all the changes you want to a photo without ever changing the original file. You also can revisit edits and easily make minor tweaks to them. This is incredibly simple compared to the old days of keeping several versions of an image as multiple TIFFs or JPEGs.

To a large degree, nondestructive editing also has been available in Photoshop for a couple of versions now by using Smart Objects and Smart Filters. Combined with layer adjustments, these tools let you make almost any change without affecting your original image file. They obviously are great for photographers who use a lot of filters, but they also are really cool to use for photographers who like to combine multiple images (especially raw files) as composites.

You can make an image a smart object in several ways. The easiest is to right click on the layer in the layers palette and select Convert to Smart Object. You can also go under the Layer menu and choose Smart Objects to make the conversion. Lastly, when you open the image, you can choose Open as Smart Object. Once a layer is a smart object, any filter applied to it will be added as a smart filter, which will appear under the smart object in the layer palette. (In addition to any filter in the Filter menu, you can also create a smart filter by applying a shadow/highlight image adjustment, which for some reason you can't add as a layer adjustment.) The filter I use most often is the unsharp mask filter. As you can see in this screen print, the layer now shows an unsharp mask smart filter within the image's smart object layer.

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