On March 2, 2016 at 8:30AM the Multi-Media room at Orchard Creek was filled to near capacity to hear Allen Adler's presentation on the use of Smart Objects in Photoshop.  Allen opens his images from Lightroom and adjusts as far as Lightroom's tool can go. Lightroom's adjustments contain all the Photoshop Camera Raw (ACR) adjustments which are later saved to the file when opened in Photoshop. He then opens the image as a Smart Object in Photoshop. It should be noted that you can open images directly from Photoshop instead of Lightroom depending on which program you prefer to use to start your processing. 

When opening an image from ACR (not Lightroom) into Photoshop you can open it initially as a regular PSD image or as a Smart Object. To open as a Smart Object, click on the link at the bottom of the ACR window and make sure to check the box "Open in Photoshop as Smart Objects." Once the image is open as a Smart Object he uses a combination of various plug-in filters that then become "Smart Filters" to make more refined adjustments to his image. Additional layer

adjustments can then be added above the Smart Object. More information is available in the two PDF files below. 

 

The main point of his presentation was that if you convert your image to a Smart Object before making any adjustments, when you add filters and create adjustment layers, you retain your original RAW image data and you can reopen the filters or adjustment layers to go back and work on the individual adjustments you made or even delete them while leaving the rest of your work intact. You won't have to go back in your history layers and create adjustments all over. Or if you close the image and want to make changes later, you won't have to start over from the beginning as you might have to do if you had not converted your image to a Smart Object. All the filters and