Written by Steve Patterson. Part of our complete collection of Photoshop Basics tutorials.

In a previous tutorial, we looked at how to move photos between Photoshop documents, an absolutely essential skill for blending photos together since we need both images to be inside the same document before we can do anything interesting with them. In that tutorial, we covered three simple ways to move photos - "drag and drop", the Duplicate Layer command, and "copy and paste" - that work with all versions of Photoshop.

In Photoshop CS4, though, Adobe made some rather big changes to Photoshop's interface by introducing tabbed document windows. The classic floating document windows that have been part of Photoshop since forever are still around, but Adobe has been making a big push lately to create a consistent looking interface across all of its products so that anyone who's comfortable with using Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign or any Creative Suite program can jump right into any of the other programs and feel at least somewhat familiar with it.

That's great for Adobe, but possibly not so great for anyone who's upgraded from an earlier version of Photoshop and suddenly finds that dragging and dropping photos between documents no longer works. Or at least, no longer works the way it used to. As we'll learn in this tutorial, you can still drag a photo from one tabbed document into another. It's just not quite as intuitive as it is with floating document windows.

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Photoshop Preferences

I mentioned a moment ago that floating document windows are still an option in Photoshop CS4 and CS5, and we can tell Photoshop which type of interface we prefer to use in the Preferences. On a PC, go up to the Edit menu in the Menu Bar along the top of the screen and choose Preferences. On a Mac, go up to the Photoshop menu and choose Preferences. You can also get to the Preferences with the handy keyboard shortcut Ctrl+K (Win) / Command+K (Mac). Either way opens the Preferences dialog box.

You'll see a list of various Preferences categories along the left of the dialog box. Click on the Interface category, second from the top:

There, in the Panels & Documents section, you'll find an option that says Open Documents As Tabs:

With his option selected (checked), Photoshop will open all images in tabbed document windows. If you prefer floating document windows, uncheck this option. In that case, you'll also want to uncheck the option below it, Enable Floating Document Window Docking. This tutorial assumes you're using the tabbed document window interface. And now, let's see how to move photos between them!

Here, I have two photos open in Photoshop, but unlike floating document windows which allow us to see both images at once, the tabbed document window interface only shows us one image at a time, at least by default. We'll see how to change that a bit later in the tutorial:

To switch between the photos, we need to click on their name tabs at the top of the document windows. The tab of the currently active document will appear highlighted. I'll click on the second photo's name tab to select it.

And now, we can see my second image:

With floating document windows, where we could see both images onscreen at once, dragging one photo into the other photo's document was simple. But how do you do it when you can only see one photo at a time? Well, it's not the most intuitive thing in the world, but it's actually very easy.

First, switch to the photo you want to move into the other document by clicking on its name tab. I want to move the wedding couple into the hearts and roses photo, so I'll click on the wedding couple's name tab to select it:

We need Photoshop's Move Tool to move the photo, which you'll find at the top of the Tools panel. Click on its icon to select it:

With the Move Tool selected, click anywhere inside the photo you need to move and, with your mouse button still held down, drag the photo up onto the name tab of the second document:

Keep your mouse button held down as you hover the cursor over the name tab, and Photoshop will switch over to the second photo. Don't let go of your mouse button yet. Keep it held down and drag the cursor down into the second photo:

Release your mouse button at the spot where you want the photo to appear and Photoshop drops it into place. Or, hold down your Shift key just before releasing your mouse button and Photoshop will center the photo inside the document. Here, I've simply dropped it along the right of the second photo:

If we look in the Layers panel, we see that the hearts and roses image, which was the original image in this document, is sitting on the Background layer, and the wedding couple photo has been added on its own layer above the Background layer:

By default, tabbed document windows only show one image at a time, but there's a way to change that and make dragging and dropping between documents easier, which we'll look at next!

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