From the course: InDesign Secrets
218 Copying and pasting Photoshop paths - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
218 Copying and pasting Photoshop paths
- You've probably heard me say that you shouldn't copy and paste pixels from Photoshop into InDesign. You can technically do it, but it probably cause problems down the line like colors changing, but note that I said don't copy pixels from Photoshop. Photoshop also has vector drawing tools and sometimes you might want to get paths from Photoshop into InDesign, and for that, you will be using copy and paste. But, there's a trick. Let me show you. First, let's switch to Photoshop. And now, here in Photoshop, let's draw a path or vector shape. To do that, I'm going to switch to the custom shape tool which you can find underneath the rectangle tool. I'll just click and hold for a moment and then from this little fly-out menu choose Custom Shape tool. Now, I need to choose a shape, and I can find that in the Shape pop-up menu up here in the Options bar. Isn't that cool? Did you know that Photoshop has all these shapes built into it? In fact, there's even more, and you can find those by clicking on the gear icon and then choosing one of these libraries down here. I'm going to go crazy and just click all. And Photoshop asks me if I want to replace those current shapes and I can say yes. Let's go ahead and replace those. And now I can see all of the shapes that Photoshop knows about. These are all vector shapes. So, all I need to do is click one of them like this butterfly and then click and drag out here. I should point out that when you're using the custom shape tool, up here in the Options bar, you want to make sure that this pop-up menu is set to either Shape or Path. We don't want pixels. I'll leave it set to Shape. So, now that I have my cool vector shape here on Photoshop, how do I get it into InDesign? Obviously, I could just save this as a .pdf and then I could place it as a graphic on my InDesign page, but in this case, I want the paths because I'm going to be doing something with them in InDesign. So, I want to copy that object, that path. Right now, it's currently selected, but let's say I switch to a different tool and you'll notice that now it's deselected. To select it again in Photoshop, all I need to do is click on the selection tool. That's the black arrow tool here and you'll see it automatically get selected. Now all I need to do is copy it to my clipboard which I can do in the Edit menu of course. Now, this shape is on the clipboard and I wish that I could just paste it into InDesign, but I can't because I'll get an error. It's really frustrating. So, what can I do? Well, it turns out that I can paste from Photoshop into Illustrator. So, I'll switch to Illustrator which I just happen to have open here. And I can paste here. I'll press cmd + v or ctrl + v on Windows. Illustrator asks me how I want to paste it and I'll choose compound shape, and then I'll click OK. And, there's the shape. Note that the fill color does not come along with it. It's just clear, no fill, no stroke and that's a problem for InDesign because InDesign cannot deal with it unless there's a fill or a stroke color. So, I'll come up here and I'll just fill it with some color. It doesn't really matter what. Now that I have a shape with a color, I can copy that to the clipboard. So, I'll just press cmd + c or ctrl + c on Windows and here I can switch back to InDesign. Now, as you probably know, you can copy and paste vectors from Illustrator into InDesign. So, here in InDesign, all I need to do is paste; cmd + v or ctrl + v on Windows. There we go. There's the shape. And it's the real vector shape too. If I press the A key on my keyboard to switch to the direct selection tool, you can actually see if you squint all these little vector points on the path. So, this is great. Now that I have the path, I can do stuff with it. For example, I'll press V to go back to the selection tool and then I'll go to the file menu and choose place. Here in the place dialog box, I can simply select an image I want, click open, and you'll see it fills that shape with that image. Of course, I could do even more. I could go to the Effects panel, click in the Effects pop-up menu, and give this an inner shadow. You get the point. It's a real InDesign frame and you an use all of InDesign's features on it. So now you know. When you need to get paths from Photoshop to InDesign, use Illustrator as the intermediary step.
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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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