Pasting images into Photoshop

You can paste images into Photoshop. Basically, you can paste whatever is in the copy buffer into Photoshop.

Find something to copy. In this case, I copied an open Firefox window. (Hit Alt-Prtscrn to copy the current active window. Prtscrn by itself will copy the entire screen, or screens if you have more than one.)

Snapshot of shinynewts home page

I reduced the size of the above image for web page display, but it was about twice as big on my monitor when I took the snapshot of it.

Select New from the File menu in Photoshop. A screen will open and it will have the height and width of whatever is in the copy buffer. In this case,the Firefox window I had open was 813 by 570.

File New in Photoshop displaying the size of what's in the copy buffer

Select okay.

The screen that comes up just after hitting File/New when something is in the copy buffer

Once the blank layer is displayed, hit Control-V to paste or select Paste from the Edit menu.

Edit/Paste - after pasting an image into Photoshop from the copy buffer

Now, say you are in a Word document and you want to paste some of the word text into a Photoshop image.

Screen shot of a little word screen

Now, when you paste that into Word after copying the text into the copy buffer, you'll end up with a graphic image in Photoshop, not text.

paste word text into photoshop

Other things you can paste into Photoshop include:

  • Clipart from other programs
  • Anything you see on your screen that you can capture with PrtScrn or a variation of PrtScrn
  • Anything you can get into the copy buffer