Using Smart Objects & Relinking Images in Photoshop
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Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
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Hi there, this video is all about getting our money's worth, all the effort we put in. We make sure the Smart Objects, by default we've been linking them without knowing, let's get started.
So let's say it is the next course that I'm doing, but because I've set this all up, it's reusable. What's cool about it is, let's say it's now Photoshop time. So this little graphic here needs to be Illustrator. So what I'm going to do is, with it selected, I can right click the name here, and go to this one that says 'Relink to File'. I can go out to my 'Exercise Files', '09 Artboards', 'Logo - Illustrator, kickback, you ready? This is the satisfying part. That's not. Click 'OK'. Look at all those graphics update. Cool, huh?
Same is true of pictures of me. You can right click them anywhere because it's a Smart Object. I did that at the beginning. What ends up happening is, as you duplicate it, it comes along for the ride. And they are still linked. But say that's not what you want. You want another copy of me, but you don't want a link, because when you update it, it's not what you want. So I'm going to make a duplicate, like that, that's the bad way. What I can do is, in this layer here I can right click it, and there's an option that says, a 'New Smart Object', please, but 'via Copy'. Just means they're going to make a new Smart Object but they're not linked.
So these two look the same, but they don't have that kind of connection, like all these other fellows do. Let's do it, let's update this one here. I'll right click it, and I'm going to go to, 'Relink to File', there's now 'Daniel 2' in there, grab him. You can see, he updated, he updated, he updated. Now you'll see that they didn't update perfectly in the right spot, because there were different size images. What I really wanted to do for you is make the images perfect, they're all lined up. That wouldn't be really realistic when you go using, you’re like, "It's broken." That just happens to be a different image. So it doesn't fix everything completely, the images are just different scale.
So I select them both, I held down 'Shift', so my trick is, let's say I click down here, I hold my 'Command' key down, or 'Ctrl' on a PC. And click this fella. That's him there. If I hold the 'Command' key and 'Shift', that's on a Mac, 'Ctrl Shift' on a PC, you can click more than one across two different Artboards, because they're so similar.
Why are we making Instagram profile different from the Facebook one? They're different sizes, but the main one, Instagram has a big enough problem. I'm working on the Instagram one, I am going to make a new layer. Right at the top, use my 'Ellipse Tool'. Just to kind of start in the corner here, drag out an ellipse. And I invert that ellipse. I fill it with red, 'Deselect', lower the Opacity. Just tapping my number keys along the top. Because Instagram is circles, right? So you've got to kind of do some adjustments for Instagram. Perfect. I decided it's just not relevant there. But I want it there because I want to show you my cool little update. Did he disappear from over here? I don't know.
Anyway, upgrading Smart Objects is easy, it's just as easy for anything you've linked from the library, but a slightly different method. So we drag these flags from the library. You probably didn't, because you didn't set up a library, I did. You could have just imported these from the files, but let's say you did have them in your library and you bring it in, what you can do is, open the 'Library'. In my case it's my Adobe logos library, same thing here in your layers panel. But instead of using relink File, it's going to relink to a graphic, Library Graphic. And it says, Select and Relink. So I'm going to say, you, and then down the bottom, this tiny little button, 'Relink', and it's gone and relinked them all.
Now we've been doing this for kind of like social media profiles. Now those red things shouldn't be there, they're just temporary. I do this a lot for say web design or app design. All the principles the same, but the Smart Objects gets even nicer because you end up having say a logo that's on all of the different layouts. Maybe just different sizes to match the different view ports. Plus you've got maybe a navigation that runs consistent across them all, or footer that goes across them all. You just got them all different sizes, you can see how that would be useful. That's enough for this video. Let's cut the next one into tips and tricks for using text, and kind of viewing, now that our Artboards are getting slightly more complicated. Let's do that in the next video.