Placing files with Photoshop and Illustrator

An article by Steve    3 Comments

One of the things I love about using Photoshop and Illustrator all day in my job is I still discover the odd thing that makes my work flow quicker or easier (often both!!). One such thing I found out about a couple of months ago was the ability to place one file into another. Here I shall share the joys of placing files for the benefit of those who are yet to discover it. Let’s start with a quick example…

Say we’ve started a simple site design and we’re about to pop a logo into the top left area, of which we have a vector and perhaps one or more transparent .png versions (either designed by ourselves or provided by a client). In this example, we’re going to place a copy of the original Illustrator .ai file directly into our .psd. To do this, we choose Place from the File menu, we’re then presented with the following dialogue box.

Simply navigate to your file and click place. We’re placing an Illustrator file, so we’re prompted to select some cropping options. Our logo .ai file has crop marks set up so we may as well use them—select Crop to: Crop Box.

Our logo is then placed directly into our .psd ready to be resized and moved using the usual transform options. Adjust the logo as you like and click the tick button (or press return) to commit the changes.

Now, you might be thinking “What’s the point when you can just copy & paste one of the .png files in there?”. Of course you could do that, but if you ever want to adjust the size or colour of the logo further down the line, you’ll end up pasting in another copy, adding adjustment layers, or whatever; it could all end up getting pretty messy. Placing files has it’s advantages as they act just like smart objects. You’ll be able to resize them as much as you like and you’ll never loose out on image quality—the placed file acts like a reference to the original. To demonstrate, let’s suppose we’ve changed to a dark background and want to enlarge the logo a bit. All we have to do is use Edit > Free Transform (with the correct layer selected) and resize the logo as we wish. As for the colour, well, this is where the real advantage comes in. If we double-click our placed file in the layers panel, we’ll be taken straight to Illustrator and our logo will opened and ready for editing as if you’d opened the original .ai file itself. Now we’re free change the colour as we like, and when we’re finished, all we have to do is save it, and it’ll update when you return to Photoshop.

Bear in mind that we’re not actually making changes to our original Illustrator file, just the copy of it that has been placed into Photoshop. Also, any duplicates you have made in the layers panel will also change; as I said, they act just like smart objects.

Right, one more example.
We’ve put together this background in Photoshop…

…and we need to add an image of our lovely new product to it. We’re going to use place again, but this time we’re adding a .psd in which we’ve extracted our product from it’s background. We could use place to add a transparent .png, but I find adding the .psd gives you more options when you want to adjust the placed file.

Lovely! Next, we need to add our logo along with some text but we’ll be doing this in Illustrator rather than here in Photoshop. Why? Mainly because Illustrator is better for handling text, but also because that’s what I want to demonstrate in this example!

We’ve created a new file in Illustrator which has the same dimensions as our background. Next, exactly as we did with Photoshop, we choose Place from the File menu and select our composite .psd file from the dialogue; notice that we also have some extra options here. Ticking link will tie the placed file to the original .psd—any changes you make to the placement will affect the original .psd, and any changes to the .psd outside Illustrator will update it in Illustrator too. This suits our example fine so we’ll stick to that. Click the place button to place the file and then move our placement into position. Now we can add in our logo—again, I’ve used place to add our original .ai logo into our composition. If we want to make any changes to our linked placements, you’ll need to bring up the Links panel (you’ll find it under the Window menu).

All that’s left is to add our text and we’re done.

Well, you get the idea. Essentially, placing files in this way can really help you to keep your work files that little bit tidier, and gives you some efficient editing options. Anyway, I’ve merely given you an introduction to placing files, and there’s plenty of options and file combinations I haven’t covered here. I always find the best way to learn new ways of working is to experiment and I sincerely encourage you to do so and work out what works best for you, if at all.