Symmetrical drawing in Photoshop

Alex Dukal shows a clever hack using Smart Objects to enable symmetrical, if not quite real-time drawing & painting in Photoshop. Check it out, including the how-to part that starts around the 2-minute mark. I followed his steps to create a simple PSD that’s set up as described.

[Via reader Marcel]

5 thoughts on “Symmetrical drawing in Photoshop

  1. Very clever. In the video, it looks like the “master document” is getting updated as he’s painting in the “left.psb” file. Is he just manually pressing Cmd+S every once in a while to get that to happen?

  2. What a surprise! It was weird to view this in my feeds reader 🙂 Thank you John and Marcel!
    As Michael asked, yes I do Ctrl+S (CMD+S) while painting or drawing, it’s the only way I found to get the main doc updated.
    Cheers!

  3. What puzzles me is how the evolution of software genres differs. Editing in symmetry, on any combination of axis, radially and in 3D has been available since the stone age of 3D modelling – every Freebie comes with this feature. The realtime mirror action takes place on arbitrary 3D meshes which impose far more complex boundary conditions than silly pixels which can get blended at will. For me it’s hard to understand that Photoshop hasn’t got that feature built in since its first release.

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