Rasterize Photoshop smart objects on import
Our team is in the process of moving a significant portion of our website/web app design & production pipeline from Photoshop to XD.
Currently, one of our biggest snags involves having to re-import Smart Objects because they lose their appearance in XD. When we have created several Smart Objects in Photoshop, all the effects within that Smart Object disappear when imported to XD:
- Feathered vectors lose their feathered edges
- Blending modes are ignored
- Raster masks are ignored
I understand that it might be a relatively long while before individual Smart Objects can update dynamically from the CC Library (I'm putting in another feature request for this), but for the time being can your team please make it so the imported Smart Objects are at least brought in as flattened transparent PNGs so they maintain their appearance?
Thank you!
-Josh KLPA
Josh Klpa
shared this idea
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Dan Meyer
commented
I was running into a similar issue and found a workaround with the new version of XD. If you place a raster version of your object (Let's say a 1920x200px jpg of a website header, desktop_header.jpg) into XD, and then right-click on it and choose "Edit in Photoshop" it'll pop open in Photoshop as a .psd file (desktop_header.psd), which is located deep on your computer in a Temporary folder location within XD. With that .psd open, drag all of your smart object content from your original file into the one made by XD, and save it.
The end result is a .psd file in XD effectively "Linked" like how you'd expect a link from InDesign to work. It'll move as a single object, retain all of XD's features and trnasforms, but upon selecting "Edit In Photoshop" it will retain all of it's smart, editable characteristics.
The downside is that the file is hidden to some degree buried deep in the temporary XD file structure, but it alludes to me this potential to link objects from within XD is possible, they just haven't found a decent UI/UX solution to it yet. I'd like to see a linking system similar to InDesign (link/edit original/package), whereby you just edit and maintain links in the software in which they were originally intended. That'd be the most robust solution in the long run.