P: Ability to apply masks to individual Smart Filters

A decade later and we're still waiting for this feature...

It would be very cool to be able to add a layer mask to each individual effect on a layer (ex. a layer mask on the drop shadow effect on a layer).

Currently, only one Mask is available to multiple Smart Filters applied to a Smart Object. This causes a 'conflict of interest' 🙂
It would be a very powerful tool to have an individual mask for each Smart Filter applied to a Smart Object. 

[En] Will it be possible one day to give to the smart filters an individual mask?
[Fr] Sera-t-il possible un jour que les filtres dynamiques aient chacun un masque individuel?

For smart filters if you stack them you only get a single mask. I want each smart filter in the stack to have its own mask. That would be super helpful!

The problem is getting more severe as more filters are converted into Smart Filters. You might have one mask for Field Blur, a different mask for Sharpening, and no mask at all for Liquify. Currently that requires either two duplicate layers (which almost triples your file size), or two levels of nested smart objects which has the downside of hiding what each nested smart object contains.

I notice that when a smart object is nested, the underlying image is not duplicated, so that when you save the file, you are still only saving a single copy of the image. If there was a way to create a duplicate of the smart object layer that didn't actually copy the image, that would certainly solve the problem of having multiple smart filters with multiple masks that doesn't also result in a huge file size increase. In essence you are creating a Smart Layer which contains a pointer to the image it was created from rather then a copy of the image. That gets you multiple masks for multiple filters without huge increases to file size.

It would be e great feature if every of the Smart Filters applied to Smart Objects could become a filter mask.

Due to the fact, that there presently is just one mask for all the filters, for partial filter application Layer duplication is necessary. No big deal - but messes files up.
Would lead to more tidy and neat files.

Hi Christoph,

I've had a response from Adobe and it appears that the main difficulty is one of performance. If the smart filters are all active and you paint on one of the filter masks then they all have to update in real-time ... which would clearly be very compute-intensive and probably very slow. However they have said that they will look at the issue again (perhaps they can disable the other filters during painting on a mask, for example).

It's interesting to me that you are the only person so far who has taken me up on this topic ... maybe we need a campaign to get people to start using smart objects (I would personally be lost without them ... just think, for example, of the ability to go back into the ACR object when a new version of Camera Raw comes out, click on Lens Correction or the new process and voila!).

With very fast processors, cheap memory and very cheap storage there seems no good reason not to use Smart Objects.

You may be right that CS5 offered little new with respect to Smart Objects. Puppet Warp being applicable as a Smart Filter may have tainted my perception – but it is not a distinct Smart Object feature itself.

In any case I hope your feature request will garner some more support.

I can’t locate the thread unfortunately, but I’m pretty certain one of the Adobe engineers (probably Mr.Cox) once commented on the issue over at forums.adobe.com and it is more complicated than us simple users might expect.
Still, if it is at all achievable maybe they will reconsider whether the benefits may justify the effort.