: Nesting Photoshop Smart Objects without losing the "link" between them? I have created a text layer, converted it to a Smart Object, and duplicated the Smart Object twice. I then applied Stroke

@Jennifer810

Ah, that hole in your foot appears to be from a .44 Magnum... :-)

Smart Objects are plenty smart, but when you create a new SO, it isn't linked to anything else because it's, well, new. There are good engineering reasons for this, a not-always-visible set of considerations subsumed under "Managing User Expectations." The complexity of processing filters within filters within Smart Objects within Smart Objects would slow otherwise high-performing systems to a crawl, so the engineering teams don't go there. They know it's a trade-off, but there are many compromises between what they'd like to build, the resources available, and the hardware that marketing tells them it will have to run on. This is true of every release.

In this case, however, you can get there by using an Outer Bevel (which effectively applies a bevel to the stroke, rather than the zero-opacity text), setting it to "Down" instead of "Up", adjusting the size, picking a gloss contour that gets you in the ballpark and editing it to exactly what you need. If you've never edited a gloss contour before, you're in for some fun. Just click on the ramp, same as you would for a gradient, and a curves-like edit window opens up.

Vote Up Vote Down