Jacquelin Vanderwood

November 2005

We're going to learn about Smart Objects in this lesson. Below you can see that I have Photoshop CS2 open and in conjunction with that there is a picture open as well of the Kirkland wetlands that I took last week with my digital camera. I want to place a graphic that I made in Illustrator CS2 into my picture and so to do that I start by choosing File>Place.

I then find the file which I have saved in a easily located place on my hard drive, select the file, and hit Place. It will be an .ai file so keep that in mind.

We can see the graphic created and so we click on it and press Ok. 

Since this is a vector graphic, it will be expandable and reducible even in Photoshop. I've placed the graphic but have not deselected it yet. To do that, hit the Enter key on your keyboard. If you so choose, before deselecting it, you can increase or decrease the size by pressing the Shift key and dragging on the corner.

Take a look at the layers palette. Notice that the graphic that was placed in Photoshop has an icon attached to it. That icon is telling you that this graphic is a Smart Object. What does that mean? It means that if you double-click on the layer that you will be transported back into Illustrator CS2 to edit the graphic.

After double-clicking the layer, you'll see this notification pop up. Please make sure to read it as it has important information for you to remember. Now that you have read it, check the Don't show again box.

Now that I'm back in Illustrator, I make the changes I want and then choose File>Save as the box above states to do.

When I hop back to Photoshop, I notice that the graphic has changed. Just what I wanted.

I then apply an Outer Glow through Layer Styles to bring out the graphic against the dark water and call it done.  

Copyright (c) 2005, Jacquelin Vanderwood, All Rights Reserved