From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Duplicating shapes as Smart Objects - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Duplicating shapes as Smart Objects

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- [Instructor] In the next few minutes, we're going to take a look at how we can take advantage of smart objects to work with multiple instances of a shape and keep the editing of those shapes as efficient and flexible as possible. In the toolbar, I'm going to select the polygon tool. I can right click and reset the tool, and then I'll keep the fill set to black and remove the stroke. I'm going to set the number of sides to six, and as I start dragging out the polygon tool, I'm going to hold down the shift key, which will constrain its proportions and I'm going to hold down the command key, which will enable me to rotate it so that I have a point at the top and the bottom. Alright, I'll tap the V key to select the move tool and reposition that. And for now, let's convert the background into a layer and toggle off the visibility of it. To hide the checkerboard, I can either choose the transparency preferences or we can just create a solid color fill layer, fill that with white, and then place it below layer zero. All right, before I start making duplicates of this polygon to clip the photo to, I'll want to convert it to a smart object. So I'll choose layer and then smart objects, convert to smart object. If I use the layer menu and choose layer, and then new layer via copy, Photoshop is going to create a copy of that layer, but it doesn't make a copy of the smart object. So both of these layers are going to be referencing the same smart object under the hood. Likewise, if I use the keyboard shortcut command J, it will create an instance and if I hold down the option key and I click and drag out a copy, Photoshop would also make an instance. If, however, you go to the layer menu and choose smart objects and create a new smart object via copy, then it's going to break that instance by creating a new copy of that layer and that smart object. So as long as we don't select this one, we'll always have instances. Alright, let me just delete these three and then I'm just going to hold down the option key on Mac or the alt key on Windows, drag over the first copy, and then hold down the shift key and use my arrow keys to nudge it over too. I'll do the same thing here, but now I'm using the smart guides, still holding down that option or alt key in order to create my six different copies. Once I have them created in the layers panel, I will select them all and then drag them to the group icon to put them in a group. Now, in order to duplicate this group, we can use the layer menu and then new and then layer via copy. But because we have a group targeted, it will copy the entire group. I'll go ahead and reposition this group, and this time I'll use the keyboard shortcut, command J on Mac or control J on Windows to create another copy, and then we can align that. All right, I want to remove two of these polygons, so I will right click with the move tool, and that's going to enable me to quickly select the layer in the image area without having to find it in the layers panel. I'll go ahead and tap delete to remove it, and then right click, select it again and tap delete. If I want to close all of my groups with a single click, I can hold down the command key on Mac, control on Windows, and click on the disclosure triangle to close them all. I'll select all three groups and drag 'em down to the folder to create a single group. Then I want to transform all of the polygons at once, so I'll use Command T, or we can go to edit and then free transform. I'll reposition it and then drag it out so that it's larger in the document. We can apply that. Then I want to clip the photograph, so I'll make it visible, place it on top of group two, and then choose layer, create clipping mask. Now we can only see the photograph where there's contents in the group below it. This makes it very easy for me to select the photograph and reposition it as needed or select the group and reposition it. But what if I want to change the shape of the polygons? Because we converted them to a smart object before we started duplicating them, I can select any of the smart objects and double click on the thumbnail in the layers panel in order to view the contents of that smart object. Then I'll choose window arrange, and we can tile these. I'll make this window a little bit smaller. In fact, we can even zoom out. And then I'll click in the parent document and zoom out there as well, so that we can see the effects of the changes that we make. With the contents of the smart object selected, let's make some changes using the properties panel. If I wanted to set the corner roundness now to say 80, we can enter that and see the change made to the polygon. As soon as I select file and then save, it will save those changes and we can see it's updated in the parent document. All right, let's try another, I'm going to change the number of sides to eight. I'll put the corner roundness back to zero, but I'll put the star to 50%. This time, I'll just use command S in order to save this, and we can see that it's been updated. All right, one more, I'll return to six sides and we'll reduce the star indent down to 3% and save that, and we get a completely different look. Alright, I think I like the first one best though. So let's put the star indent to 100 and then we'll move the corner roundness to 80. I'll use command S to save that. It'll be updated and now we can close the contents of the smart object. So there you have it, a great way to use smart objects with shape layers, live shape properties in Photoshop.

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