Photoshop Elements 7 Smart Object?

[MariaFlower]

When adding photos to a page they become smart objects?? My page is in the work area and then I drag the photo to the page. When it is a smart object I cannot cut the photo with the rectangle marquee tool, when I use the backspace a message appears " could not complete your request because the smart object is not directly editable". What am I doing wrong?

[troush]

Maria,

I suspect you are dragging up from the project bin to you layout? In PSE 6.0, they changed it so when you do that, it creates a smart object. Uhg!

Go to Window(s)->Images->Tile or Cascade, and use the Move tool to drag and drop your photos between documents, rather than up from the project bin.

Another option is to use File->Place.

-Trish

[MariaFlower]

Oh.....now I see.
I did as you suggested and it worked perfectly..
There are so many things to remember, thank you very much

[troush]

Glad you got it sorted. That is one of my LEAST favorite changes between PSE 5.0 and PSE 6/7. Drives me crazy when I forget.

-Trish

[croppycatter]

yeah! why on Earth did they do that???

[troush]

My guess - those new frames they offer in the effects are all smart objects. They're assuming that you're using their templates and frames, so they thought, "We'll just make this stuff smart objects, because the user will probably be dragging pictures into frames." They didn't think about us "regular scrapbookers" who would be doing their own things...

-Trish

[dmrdm]

Noting having Elements, it may not act the same as it does on CS3...but in CS3, if you have a smart object...and you want to lasso a part...in the new LO you have placed it in...what I do is duplicate the layer first, then do a right click and "rasterize the layer". Then you can select your tool as you describe.

Smart objects are great. They allow you to scale and rescale with non-destructive editing. There is a lot more to them, than I've described here. Don't want to confuse things, but if you have placed the SO into another object...but say want to recolor a part of it - you could double click on the SO and it will bring you back to the original file to make the changes. It saves the changes to the orginal and they are reflected in the LO you have placed it in also.

Anyway...want to add my disclamer again...they may not work the same in Elements (probably don't) ...but in CS 3 (believe they appeared in CS2) they are wonderful!! If it does, maybe sometime it would come in handy for you.

(I'll stop reading Elements threads from now on since I don't have the program installed anymore) :-)

[1000words]

Soooo...I know I'm joing this conversation QUITE abit later than the rest of you, but I have a question...

If I've added photos to my LO as SOs...and they were on an external hard drive (or a CD, or a flash drive...etc)...and later want to work with that file, but no longer have the EHD (like...it crashed...) ... what then?

will my "image" still be there? so I can still resize it, work on levels, fix red-eye, etc?

[troush]

No, I don't think the image will still be there. It is just a reference to the file (which is why they are such memory hogs). Did you really lose a hard drive?

-Trish