/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-ideas/p-ability-to-auto-align-and-auto-blend-smart-object-layers/idi-p/12249977Nov 12, 2011
Nov 12, 2011
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Auto-align and auto-blend are two great features of Photoshop. It would be really, really great if they worked on Smart Objects! After all, the smart objects can be aligned manually (including Lens Correction, Transforms etc. And of course they can be blended manually.
/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-ideas/p-ability-to-auto-align-and-auto-blend-smart-object-layers/idc-p/12262857#M3891Mar 29, 2019
Mar 29, 2019
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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.
/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-ideas/p-ability-to-auto-align-and-auto-blend-smart-object-layers/idc-p/12262854#M3890Aug 07, 2019
Aug 07, 2019
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I'm shocked to see how long it is since this feature was first requested. Please add auto align smart object. It would be really helpful for exposure blending and focus stacking, enabling the RAW files to be edited after merging. Ever hopeful...
/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-ideas/p-ability-to-auto-align-and-auto-blend-smart-object-layers/idc-p/12262848#M3888Aug 09, 2019
Aug 09, 2019
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Auto-align should be possible to do. I’m not sure that Auto-Blend is possible with smart objects. That requires changing individual pixels, and that is not possible because the underlying object needs to remain unchanged. Just like it is not possible to clone or heal in a smart object.
/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-ideas/p-ability-to-auto-align-and-auto-blend-smart-object-layers/idc-p/13042297#M14969Jun 30, 2022
Jun 30, 2022
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@JohanElzenga The "seamless tones and colors" wouldn't work without a smart filter option to match color. So you're correct that the full "auto blend" functionality would be simple to support for Smart Objects. However, partial support would be incredibly useful for focus stacking and should be fairly simple to create (just adding masks based on the raster equivalent of each Smart Object). All we really need there for focus stacking is support the "stack images" feature of auto-blend to generate masks on Smart Objects.
This is long overdue. Smart objects are such an important part of landscape photography workflow that this omission from Photoshop needs to be addressed. Thank you.
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