Photoshop: Enlarged Raster Smart Objects that contain vectors appear as resized bitmaps

We read posts on both forums, and only rarely request that reports be copied to another forum.

Why are you seeking rudeness where none exists?

My tone is more educational, or slightly bemused (as in "how did someone think that could work?" and "Could I get Mythbusters to put someone on the back of a semi in a giant halfpipe?").

The child smart object document/file has to be rasterized, color converted, transformed, and filtered before it is composited with the parent document. It doesn't matter what data is inside the raster file - the result is a raster image because it is inside the raster document. There is no mismatch because the file (in this case PSD or PSB) is a raster file. All the bits that went into making the child file (pixels, vectors, other smart objects, styles, etc.) don't matter, because the result of rasterizing the child file (at it's defined size, resolution, mode, depth, profile, etc.) is all we have to work with.

To preserve the vector nature of objects in the child document/file, it would have to be a vector file (EPS, PDF, AI). That could then be rasterized at any size and transform (within the limits of vector smart objects).

Does that help?

And as a feature request, I'm afraid this would come under the heading of "not even possible". It could be rephrased into "want instanced vector layers", or "want another file format for vectors that can be created directly from photoshop" (because PDF, EPS and AI can't reproduce all the vector features of Photoshop exactly) - but neither of those are exactly trivial. As always, the more we know about what you are trying to accomplish, the better chance we have of delivering something that solves the problem.

Also note that most of the staff behavior on the Adobe forums is pretty good (we do a lot of self policing).

The problems are generally with some of the "regulars" who are not Adobe employees. We try to keep the discussions clean and on topic, but it is a public forum and well, we get all kinds.

Would you mind if we left this here? I'm positive that someone else has or will have the same misunderstanding.

Yes, scaling the vector shape inside the same document re-rasterizes that vector inside that document, with all the vector goodness preserved. But a raster smart object: think of it as a flattened PSD, with the vectors smashed into pixels.

And yes, working at high res and scaling down is a good way to deal with it -- until single pixel lines disappear (don't scale down more than 2x if using single pixel lines).

you are being a defensive jerkass