Thanks John. Yeah, I hit that sort-of solution last night. I don't LIKE it, but it's there.
Create smart object. Go into ACR and lower exposure and shove shadows all the way up.
Create new layer, do content aware for cleanup. So far things look OK.
Decide I ALSO want to do Shadows/Highlights. Have to do that on a Smart Object, so I take the 2 layers and make a NEW Smart Object with my original Smart Object in it.
Add Shadows/highlights and it looks OK.
Realize my ACR from previously is totally garbage and I need to UNDO it.
Open ACR again and when I go in, everything is back to zero.
It kind of works, but it’s WEIRD! And it makes my brain hurt.
And in six months when I open this how do I easily (idiot proof-ly) tell I now have two layers of Smart Objects? I can OPEN them, and open again, but in six months how am I going to remember I HAVE all these layers of smart objects?
I’m not involved in Photoshop engineering and I have NO idea how painful it would be, but since we’re now in an environment where non-destructive is being pushed a lot and tools like Content-Aware fill work the way they do – and I suspect other tools do or will – it would be nice to have some way to update layers derived from the Smart object when modified by a smart filter modification. A “I know Layer ‘X’ got it’s pixels from me (smart object in layer X-4, and my perceived output is different because of a smart filter, so here are all the altered pixels you’re using X.” Now any layer that had pixels from the smart object would match again…
It is, of course, a really EASY thing to suggest, but may be immensely difficult to do...
