P: Ability to Auto-Align and Auto-Blend Smart Object layers

It would be extremely useful to be able to auto-align Smart Objects ( for panoramas, exposure blending, Milky Way sky blends into blue hour shots, focus stacking, etc). This would allow revision of RAW settings after alignment, which provides much more flexibility and capability.

If it makes a difference for development, I believe only Camera RAW Smart Objects would need support. I don't see a need to align other types of Smart Objects. The goal is very much similar to HDR and panos in Lightroom, where we can edit the RAW after merging - but across a range of scenarios Lightroom does not address.

I'd expect the development probably wouldn't be too substantial for auto-align (as alignment could be determined on the rasterized equivalent of each Smart Object, and Smart Objects can already be warped).



Support for auto-blend is a nice to have in my opinion (the need is much higher for auto-align, merge to HDR pano in Lightroom covers some of the intended use for auto-blend, and development effort for auto-blend appears more complicated/nuanced when considering the details). I'd love to have it in some capacity too (such as masking for focus stacks), but consider these completely independent requests.

Auto blend would be highly useful for the layers in a smart object!

Yes. This is badly needed.

Yes please! Including linked smart objects!

Yes! It's a pain when doing any small compositing, to have to abandon the non-destructive editing.