Sometimes it is necessary to paste a photo or paper or element into an actual set area on your layout. A good example of this is the film strip element in the layout below. I’ve added photos and a background paper to four of the film strip’s blank squares. I could paste my photo on top of the film strip, size the photo down and crop it or cut of portions of the photo so that it looks like it is fitting into the film strip, but this requires a lot of guess work and labor intensive precision. A quicker way is to use the “paste into” command in Photoshop.

To add a photo to the last blank square on the film strip, first open the photo you would like to add, select the photo and “copy” and “paste.” Then with the film strip layer selected, using the square marqee tool, draw a box around the perimeter of the blank white space of the film strip. This will put the moving marquee around the perimeter of the white space of the film strip. Here I’m showing the marquee being drawn to the size of the white square.

Now, with your film strip layer still selected, and your marquee still active, go to Edit/Paste Into. Your photo will now appear right into the film strip square. But as you see, it’s too large. We’re only seeing a portion of the photo. The photo needs to be reduced to fit properly in the square.

It’s easy to resize the photo at this point. As you’ll see, when we used the “paste into” command, a new layer was created above the film strip layer. This is your newly pasted photo layer. With that new layer still selected, go to Edit/Transform/Scale and the scale bars will appear around the photo. You can now click and hold one of the corners, while holding down the shift key, to resise the photo and the photo magically stays inside of the film strip box. If you scale it as such that you can no longer see it in your box, just use the move tool to move it back inside the box.

You can play with the size, rotate it, whatever you like. It will always stay in the perameters of the film strip box. When you get the image where you like it, you can merge down the layer if you wish, or keep it as a separate layer for future altering.

That’s all there is to it! The Paste Into tool can be very handy indeed!

Click here for a printable copy of this tutorial.