Now, let us bring in our other vector element and that one will be our logo design, our flaming tire. I am going to do something a little bit different this time because I specifically want to retain that vector information for later edits.

Instead of opening the file and dragging it or copying and pasting it into our document like we did before. This time, I am going to go up to the File and use Place. With the CS2 package, place will retain the vector information by using what is called a smart object.

Now, I just need to go navigate out to the Assets folder and bring in the Alien Auto logo. We will just click on Place. My Place dialog box is very similar to the import one we saw before but you will notice that we do not have any rasterization options over here on the side because this object is going to be retaining all of its vector information. We can access that whenever we need to. So, I am just going to click “OK” and we get our Alien Auto logo and a smart object vector format.

Now, our placed object comes directly in with the transform handles and a transform function activated. So, I am just going to hit “Enter” to commit to those transform changes. We can always adjust that later. And what I would like to point out is that our smart objects get a special icon on the layer palette so you can identify them.

Now, I can see one change I want to make right away. Our logo design looked great when we are working with it on a white background but obviously, our website is going to be having this middle gray background and the black does not show up quite as well.

I would like to make that change directly using the vectors that we had on the original file, so a new lighter version of the logo will look just as good as the darker one that we started with. If you ever want to edit the smart object, all you need to do is go over to the layer palette and double click on the smart object icon.

Now, at the first time you do this, Photoshop will pull up this alert dialog box that will tell you what to do. All you need to do is make our change to the object, choose “File” and “Save” and it will bring us right back to Photoshop, so that we can see the effect of our changes. I will just click “Don’t Show Again” and we will click “OK” and we will go on with the rest of the process.

Now, since this is a vector object, you will notice that it is opening up Illustrator. It is going to bring us right into the environment that will give us access to all the controls we need to modify a vector object.

Now, over an illustrator, I am just going to move the window over just a little bit out of the tool palette’s way to show you that we are now editing a file called “vectorsmartobject02” this is a temporary file that is being pulled over into Illustrator.

Note: we are not going to be making any changes to the original illustrator file we pulled in. All of our changes will only be made to the instance of our smart object that we placed in our Photoshop file.

Now, this is the entire object as we imported it. I got access to everyone of the vectors and you will see over here on Layer 01 and inside the group, just clicking on those to open them up. But I have the same pass that we created in our last lesson.

Now, I can select all of those elements and very quickly make a change of the fill. We will just double click on the fill color and set that up to let us say to a medium gray. Now, I am not going to go all the way to light, mostly because I want to be able to see what we are doing inside of the illustrator.

We will make that change and there you can see, we have our light gray vector now on the white background. I am going to push that up just a little bit further before we go back. And now as the dialog stated, if we are finished with our changes, all we have to do is go up to the “File” menu and choose save.

We will save all of our changes and then go right back into Photoshop and you will see that the smart object has saved all of those changes from Illustrator. This procedure will work with virtually anything you do to that vector