Paste from InDesign into Photoshop

Did you know that you can copy and paste objects from InDesign into Photoshop? Why would you want to copy something from InDesign into Photoshop? Perhaps you need some multi-column text in Photoshop, or something else that you know how to easily do in InDesign but not in Photoshop. Here's how it works:

In InDesign, be sure that in Preferences > Clipboard Handling, Copy PDF to Clipboard is selected. Then, select one or more objects in InDesign, and choose Edit > Copy. Next, in Photoshop choose File > Paste. The object will appear in Photoshop with a bounding box around it. Move or resize this bounding box as desired, then hit the return key. The object will appear in the Photoshop Layers panel as a Vector Smart Object.

If you choose Layer > Smart Object > Edit Contents, the contents of the layer will open in Illustrator, not InDesign, unfortunately. This is because the content is copied out of InDesign as PDF content. So we don't have the holy grail of "round trip" content editing between InDesign and Photoshop, but this can still be useful for certain tasks.