Kens Photoshop Blog

If you have not used smart objects in photoshop yet, it’s time to start. When you turn a layer into a smart object you can do most edits on the layer totally non-desctructively. You can for example scale the image to your hearts content without ever loosing image quality because photoshop is working in the original file each time you scale it. Blending modes and layer styles works to.

The realy cool thing about smart objects is that you can apply filters to them 100% non-destructively. Apply some unsharp mask and find out later that it needs a bit less? Just doubleclick the smart filter and readjust without loosing image data.

That’s all cool, but few people know that they can actually have a photoshop smart object be a direct link to the RAW file and there’s 2 ways to do it.

Open a new RAW file as a smart object.

Go to the file menu and select Open as Smart Object. Camera RAW opens so you can adjust whatever and you get a layer that is a smart object. Doubleclick the layer and Camera RAW opens up.

Place RAW files into existing project as smart object layers.

With any project opened, go to the file menu and select Place pick a RAW file

Yep you read that right. When you doubleclick the smart object created this way Adobe Camera RAW opens up like when you normally open a RAW file and places the RAW as a smart object layer. This way you can place as many layers as smart objects linked to the RAW file.

Anyone doing Exposure Blending using multiple RAWs with different exposures should immidiately jump out of the chair in joy. Imagine doing exposure blending and finding out that one of the layers needs to have the exposure tweaked to blend better. Just doubleclick the layer and adjust the exposure in Camera RAW. All your previous edits, layer masks and filtering will stay intact.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it