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

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

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.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

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

[herrkjeldsen]

Yes please! Including linked smart objects!

[1ndivisible]

Yes. This is badly needed.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

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

[gregbenz]

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.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Yes Pllleasse! 🙂

[Dadshade]

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...

[hotbaba]

this would be very helpful to most photographers.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Yes please.

[JohanElzenga]

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.

[swarrine]

8 years and no implementation.  Does pretty please work?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Please, please, please, pleaaaaase introduce auto-align to smart Objects...

It has been 8 years since the first request...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Sounds like a worthy endeavor to me.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

This would be extremely helpful!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Great idea. This would be super helpful!