If all this sounds a bit abstract, no fear. Over the course of the next
eight pages, abstraction will transform into brass-tacks practicality.
In the next steps, you’ll use smart objects to build a flexible project
that responds easily and quickly to your edits. It’s an exercise in
workflow enhancement, and a fun one at that.Figure 7-9.
Figure 7-10.
- Open an image. Open the layered
composition Glistenex ad.psd, in-
cluded in the Lesson 07 folder in-
side Lesson Files-PsCS5 1on1. Pictured in
Figure 7-9, this document contains the
beginnings of an advertisement for a new
antibacterial soap, which features an image
from iStockphoto’s Joshua Blake. We’ll
simulate the all-too-common ritual of de-
signing an image for a client only to have
the image returned with a list of correc-
tions. Thankfully, we will have assembled
the composition using smart objects, so
our response will be a calm and cordial
“No problem, boss.” - Place an Illustrator document.
To import a file as a smart ob-
ject, choose File→Place. Then lo-
cate and select the vector-based Illustrator
graphic Glistenex logo.ai, which you’ll find
in the Lesson 07 folder inside Lesson Files-
PsCS5 1on1.
Click the Place button, and you’ll see a
dialog box titled Place PDF (for Portable
Document Format), as shown in Figure 7-10.
(Note that I set the Thumbnail Size option
to Fit Page.) By default, Illustrator saves its
native AI files with PDF encoding, which
Photoshop needs to process the drawing
as a smart object. Besides alluding to that
fact, this dialog box is not much use to us.
It confirms cropping and lets you select a
specific page inside a multipage PDF docu-
ment. But the cropping is fine and this is a
single-page document, so there’s nothing
for you to do besides click OK.
228 Lesson 7: Sharpening and Smart Objects