Unable to really free transform smart-objects

T
Posted By
T._Mino
May 24, 2007
Views
1415
Replies
2
Status
Closed
Hello,

I work at an advertisement company and one of the things we do is making wall-ads. For this we make examples of how the finished ad would look like to show to the clients.
Now we use regular images to project the ad to the building but I want to use Smart-Objects for this.

I seem to be unable to really free transform an image after converting it to a Smart-Object..

With a normal image you can use Ctrl+T to get into free-transform mode and then scale the image with for instance taking the corner controls, this -independent- from the other corners.

With a Smart-Objects however when I drag one corner, another one also goes..

Because of this I’m unable to scale the designed ad exactly on the picture.

Failing to accomplish this in PS CS2 I was hoping it would be possible in CS3 but it remained the same..

Can someone please tell me I am doing something wrong? 😉 Because if it would be possible I have an idea that could save us really a lot (and I mean really a lot, up to a few hours per client!) of time in our workflow.

Thanks in advance for reading and you (possible) reaction.

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C
chrisjbirchall
May 24, 2007
The lack of "perspective" and "distort" in the Smart Object transformation routine is annoying.

What I would suggest would be to scale your smart object to approximately the right size immediately after "placing" it then rasterize it to complete the transformation.

As the as the idea is to produce a visual – a "proof" if you like – then the very minimal loss of quality would not matter anyway.

Perhaps we should make this a "feature request" for CS4.
T
T._Mino
May 25, 2007
Hey Chris, thanks for your reply.
It’s strange behaviour of a Smart-Object, isn’t it? I’m really a ‘want to preserve quality’ guy and do as many things as I can dynamic so that it stays flexible in case I have to make changes later.

In this case I want more the through-linking capability aspect of the smart-object.

Currently we have give and take 130 places we manually edit: make a new layer, scale/transform the clients example-design (logo & such) to match the perspective of that building on the wall.

My idea is to instead prepare a master with our locations, 1 ‘Master’ smart-object and then scale & place that on each location.
Later we could use that master (or maybe split it up in severall files because of file-size), edit the smart-object with a new example-design (logo & such) of the client, and every location would update automatically, including masks of foreground-objects & all!

This would save us an amazingly amount of time! İnstead of hours and hours we could make it ready in 30 mins or so!

I really like Photoshop but sometimes I am puzzled why appearently simple things are just not possible (like linking a mask (Vector or normal) directly to a smart-object. Now I have to put the smart-object in a group to do that..).

One of these days I will indeed make a feature request for these.

Take care,
Jax.

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