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6.

When I was done, all I had to do was to hit the key. Now, because I had prepared this layer as a Smart Object you'll notice how the Puppet Warp adjustment was added as a Smart Filter in the Layers panel. This meant that if I wanted to re-edit the puppet warp settings, I could do so by double-clicking the Puppet Warp Smart Filter and carrying on editing.

Drag and drop a document to a layer

With Photoshop CS5 it is now possible to drag and drop a file onto an open Photoshop document to create a new layer. This applies to all types of image documents and the main thing is that the image file you wish to place in this way must be of a compatible file format. In other words, you can only place image files such as TIFFs, JPEGs, Adobe PDFs, Adobe Illustrator AI files or as in the example shown below, you can also use this method to place a raw DNG image file.

1.

In Photoshop CS5 it is now possible to drag a document to an image document window that's open in Photoshop and place the dragged document as a new Smart Object layer. You can drag and drop a document via Bridge or, as shown here, directly via the Finder/Explorer.

2.

In this example I dragged and dropped a DNG file to add it as a layer in the targeted document. When you place a layer in this manner you will be placing it as a Smart Object. First of all you will see the Place Image bounding box as shown here. This allows you to scale the image before committing to the placement, but of course, since this is going to be a Smart Object, one can rescale the layer at any time without degrading the image. I should also mention that since I was placing a raw file this action opened the Camera Raw dialog and allowed me to edit the image file's raw settings before the final placement.

3.

Here is a final version of the image in which you can see that I placed the layer centrally and added a layer mask to the placed layer so that I could paint to hide some of the layer contents. Because the newly added layer was placed as a Camera Raw Smart Object, I could double-click this layer at any time to reopen the Camera Raw dialog and re-edit the layer contents.

Smart Filters

If you go to the Filter menu, there is an option there called ‘Convert for Smart Filters’. What this does is to convert a selected layer to a Smart Object, which is no different from choosing ‘Convert to Smart Object’ from the Layers panel fl y-out menu. With Smart Objects you can apply most Photoshop filters, but not all (including some third-party filters). However, you can enable all filters to work with Smart Objects by loading the ‘EnableAllPluginsforSmartFilters.jsx’ script. I'll be explaining how this is done later, in Chapter 10.

Smart Objects

One of the main problems you face when editing pixel images is that every time you scale an image or the contents of an image layer, the pixel information becomes degraded, and if you make cumulative transform adjustments, the image quality degrades quite rapidly. If you convert a layer or a group of layers into a Smart Object (Figure 9.55), this stores the layer (or layers) data as a separate image document within the master image. The Smart Object data is therefore ‘referenced’ by the parent image and edits that are applied to the Smart Object layer (such as a transform adjustment) are applied to the proxy only, instead of to the pixels that actually make up the layer.

Figure 9.55 You can promote any layer or group of layers to become a Smart Object. A Smart Object becomes a fully editable, separate document stored within the same Photoshop document. The principal advantage is that you can repeatedly scale, transform or warp a Smart Object in the parent image without affecting the integrity of the pixels in the original Smart Object document.

With Smart Object layers you can use any of the transform adjustments described so far (including Warp Transforms) plus you can also apply filters to a Smart Object layer (known as Smart Filtering). What you can't do is edit a Smart Object layer directly using,