Aha! Thank you so much MichelBParis! When we went into the PSD file, and in the Layer menu chose “simplify layers” it went back to 245Mb. Hooray!
What is a smart layer, and why did it create them without us knowing or requesting them?
hilarylondon wrote Aha! Thank you so much MichelBParis! When we went into the PSD file, and in the Layer menu chose “simplify layers” it went back to 245Mb. Hooray! What is a smart layer, and why did it create them without us knowing or requesting them? |
Imagine your project is to create a composite of a number of your photos.
When you drag such a photo from the photo bin to your canvas, you are shown the bounding box of that photo to be able to decide where to move it, resize or strighten it. The resulting layer is not a regular one with real pixels. A flattened full size copy of the dragged photo is stored into your the psd file of your canvas. What you see in the smart layer is the result of calculating the resulting transformation of that original image by a function of how you have located, sized and rotated the rectangle showing where you want the result to be. The stored image stays unchanged, but you are allowed to change your mind, move, resize and rotate later on without losing quality. With a regular layer, you will lose quality by enlarging a layer you have already placed on your canvas.
The price to pay for that flexibility is mainly the size of the resulting psd or tiff layered file. It's also that smart layers don't allow a number of operations. So, you have to 'simplify' the smart layer into a regular one, which removes the stored original and freezes the definitive pixels of the converted layer.
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