Fixpert

Ok, you’re working in Photoshop. You’ve got two documents open, sitting there on the screen next to each other. You think “my goodness, this purty gradient sure would look mighty nice over here on this other document.” So, you — being the smart cookie that you are — locate your Layers palette and click and drag the layer in question from the active document to the inactive document seated beside it. Make sense?

You’ve even gotten the visual confirmation from Photoshop that the inactive document has received this new layer because you see the little plus sign icon next to your mouse arrow, and the outline around the entire document becomes temporarily thicker as you’re dragging and dropping. These comforting little visual indicators pat you on the head and say “good job dragging that layer over here, nice work!” Ok, then where the heck is the layer? Where did it go? It’s somewhere in your document, it’s just outside of the active canvas and you have no idea if it’s above, below, to the right or left, so you don’t know if trying to drag it downward will make it go even further off screen. What do you do?

My simple little trick is to hit Ctrl-T (on a PC) or Command-F (on a Mac) which is the shortcut for Free Transform. This will throw a little box around the entire contents of your layer, indicating where it is even when it’s off your canvas. You can then use your mouse (or arrow keys) to move that puppy back onto your canvas and your work resumes!

Extra hint: if you are dragging a layer that has a layer mask associated with it, be sure that you link the mask to the layer before dragging, or else the mask will not follow the layer to the new document.