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.