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Question

toggleable pasteboard (workspace) outside the canvas.

Forum|Forum|1 month ago
February 18, 2026
5 replies
70 views

Hello Adobe Photoshop Team,

I would like to suggest a feature that would greatly improve layout flexibility and workflow efficiency in Photoshop — a toggleable pasteboard (workspace) outside the canvas.

Currently, Photoshop is strictly canvas-based, which makes it difficult to temporarily store or position elements outside the visible design area. In page-layout applications like Microsoft Publisher and Adobe InDesign, users can place objects in a surrounding workspace (pasteboard) outside the page. This makes arranging assets, testing variations, and managing complex compositions much easier.

Suggested feature:
A simple toggle option (e.g., View → Show Pasteboard) that enables a visible, usable workspace surrounding the canvas where objects can be placed freely without expanding the canvas size.

Benefits:

Faster layout experimentation and asset management
Cleaner canvas without needing oversized documents
More intuitive workflow for designers working across Adobe apps
Better support for hybrid photo-editing + layout workflows

This would be especially helpful for designers who organize multiple elements before final placement, or who move between Photoshop and layout-based software.

Thank you for your continued innovation and for considering this suggestion.

Best regards,

Legends Only

Conrad_C

Community Expert

I’m not against this feature, it would be nice to have. However, being able to see pixel content behind the canvas edge is, as far as I know, not common across photo editing apps by multiple companies.

One way to try to convince Adobe to change this is to point it out as a competitive issue. I just checked this in Affinity. It has a Clip to Canvas command, which controls whether you see content beyond the canvas edge. As expected, disabling Clip to Canvas reveals content beyond the canvas edge that you created in its Vector and Layout modules; this matches how it works in Illustrator and InDesign. What’s different is that in Affinity, disabling Clip to Canvas also lets you see pixel layer content outside the canvas…which Photoshop cannot do.

Stephen Marsh

Community Expert

As Photoshop is a pixel and canvas based program, not vector or page based, there’s no free lunch. The challenge, just as with artboards, is that there is only a single canvas.

One could create an action or script that would create a group that would contain all existing groups/layers (not artboards) with a group layer mask for the current canvas size, then create an enlarged canvas with a new group for the "pasteboard" area.

E

ExUSA

Legend

This would only be supported if you saved as PSD/PSB and why not just use layers you can toggle on and off, if you are limiting formats?

Stephen Marsh

Community Expert

Perhaps a moderator could change this post from a discussion to a feature request.

jane-e

Community Expert

@Stephen Marsh

Currently moderators cannot move posts — only Adobe staff can.

Jane

Stephen Marsh

Community Expert

Ah, another thing to miss from the previous forum software.

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

Have you tried using Artboards?

I don’t use them myself, but from what I can make out, a layer that exists inside an artboard can not be seen if moved outside the boundary of that artboard. However, if the layer is moved outside of the artboard in the layers panel, it becomes visible in the background as below. This is true anywhere on the UI regardless of the initial document size.

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