The Photoshop Productivity Series: The Productive Workflow

Pasting from Illustrator to Photoshop

I often use copy and paste when I have a document open in Illustrator and want to use selected objects in Photoshop. To do this:

1. Open both documents (one in Illustrator, one in Photoshop).

2. Select the objects in Illustrator (Figure 4.38) and choose Edit > Copy.

3. Switch to the open Photoshop document.

4. Choose Edit > Paste.

5. When the dialog displays, choose Smart Object (Figure 4.39). You can scale the graphic to the appropriate size and press Enter.

This will create a Vector Smart Object layer (Figure 4.40). When you copy and paste like this from Illustrator to Photoshop, the layer will be named Vector Smart Object.

Figure 4.38 In Illustrator, select the objects and then choose Edit > Copy.