Creating Photoshop Templates For Photo Effects In CS2 / CS3

Step 8: Add A Gaussian Blur Smart Filter To The Bottom Layer

Here's the part of the tutorial that you need to be using Photoshop CS3 for (don't worry if you're using Photoshop CS2, we'll get back to you in a moment). We're going to apply a Smart Filter to our Smart Object. Now I should clarify something before we continue. You can apply filters to Smart Objects in Photoshop CS2, just as you would apply them to a normal layer. The difference is that in Photoshop CS2, when you try to apply any filter to a Smart Object, Photoshop will pop up a warning message telling you that the Smart Object must be rasterized before the filter can be applied.

What that means is, the Smart Object will be converted back into a normal layer once again, which means it will no longer be a Smart Object, which means you will no longer be able to simply replace one photo with another inside of it. Which basically means, you lose the ability to use the Photoshop document as a template. So in other words, if your goal is to create a document that can be used as a template and you're using Photoshop CS2, don't use filters. There's still lots of other things you can do with your Smart Objects in CS2, but using filters isn't one of them. Not if you're making a reusable template, anyway.

Having said that, if you are using Photoshop CS3, click on "Layer 0" (the bottom layer) in the Layers palette to select it. Then go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, choose Blur, and then choose Gaussian Blur. This brings up the Gaussian Blur dialog box. I'm going to set my Radius value at the bottom of the dialog box to around 9 pixels. If you're using a high resolution image, try 12-14 pixels:

Click OK when you're done to exit out of the dialog box. Here's my image after applying the filter. Notice how the image in the background is now nicely blurred out:

Nothing we did here was out of the ordinary. We selected and applied the Gaussian Blur filter to the copy of the Smart Object on the bottom layer in exactly the same way we would have applied it to a normal layer. But if we look in our Layers palette, we can see that something out of the ordinary has definitely happened:

By applying the filter to a Smart Object, the filter has been converted into a Smart Filter! If we look below "Layer 0", we can see that it now says "Smart Filters", and below that is a list of all of the filters we've applied to the Smart Object. In this case, we've only applied one filter, the Gaussian Blur filter, and we can see it listed there. If we had applied several other filters to the Smart Object on that layer, they would each be listed under the words "Smart Filters". We've now successfully applied a filter to the Smart Object without having to convert it back into a normal layer. What's more, as we'll see when we go to replace the photo with a new photo, the Gaussian Blur filter will now automatically be applied to any photo we use with our template!

Smart Filters have numerous advantages, and we've only scratched the surface with them here with our discussion on how to use them when creating templates. We'll look at more of the amazing possibilities they offer in other tutorials.

We'll see how to replace our photo with another next!