I remember learning about this one from the Photoshop Guys some time ago, but recently I’ve been using it a lot in some web designs so I figured I’d share it in case you could find it useful as well. It involves using smart objects within Photoshop to keep a layer’s resolution intact even after resizing it.

If you’re as indecisive as I am when you’re designing then you like to make sure your changes are reversable as much as possible. And if you’ve ever tried to scale an image up after scaling it down you’ve realized that that’s not exactly reversible. Unless you use Smart Objects.

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I discovered this little gem of a time saver completely by accident. Thanks to a former co-worker of mine I knew about the benefits of Alt+ dragging a layer’s layer effect icon to copy that layer’s style onto another layer.

But what I didn’t know was that you could do the same for the layer’s mask. Just make sure the cursor’s over the layer mask icon.

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As my first attempt at writing a tutorial I figured I’d start small and share a simple little tidbit using shape layers.
I used to try and achieve this effect by using masks but that was too final for me. I wanted the freedom to play around with the shapes, and come back later and mess with them some more if I wanted to.

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