In this video, Colin Smith from PhotoshopCAFE shares a great tip for combining several open images in Adobe Photoshop into a single image with multiple layers and has a nice additional bonus for you as well.
What not to do
The way we have been doing this for years when we had to bring in several images that are already open in Photoshop and stack them as layers over a single image was to drag one open image over the other using the move tool – it ain’t pretty but it works.
This is quite annoying to do and if you need to do this often this can actually slow you down quite a bit. But it seems that there is a better way of doing this.
Using scrips in Photoshop
There are all sorts of things that you can do with scripts in Photoshop. One of the very simple ones is to solve the problem that we just mentioned.
Go to File>Scripts>Load files into a stack. Here instead of choosing files from your hard drive (which you can of course do if you haven’t opened the files and Photoshop yet), you can choose “add open files“, choose the ones you want and you are set to go.
Three notes:
- Make sure that you are currently selecting the image onto which you want to stack the other images.
- Make sure all the images that you are working on are saved (otherwise this will not work – annoying we know).
- Extra tip – if you want to close all the other images aside from the one you are working on click next to the image tab on an empty space and choose “close others”.
This new workflow is going to save you a lot of time if this is something that you have been doing often.
Bonus video: Colin Smith with ideas and techniques for combining and blending different layers into a single image
You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section. You can find more PhotoshopCAFE videos here on LensVid.
Iddo Genuth 
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