Bringing Photos into Photoshop for Compositing

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I am still new with PS. My question surrounds collecting a group of images within PS in order tp form a composite image. Thanks for any help.

1. you can bring images into PS from LR and have them appear in the layers panel as smart objects.

2. you can open a number of images directly to PS and then do drag-and-drop over a base image to get those images to appear as layers.

3. you can use the place embedded command to bring an image directly into PS and have that image appear in the layers panel.

Questions: is the place embedded the fastest way to get a series of images appearing in the layers panel as layers? 

When you bring in a few pictures you want to appear as layers, why can't you right click on the imported image(s) and select 'Create Layer' ?  That sems like a very easy way to create a layer from an image.

Thoughts?

[melissapiccone · Accepted solution]

Place embedded is not the fastest way - see my preferred methods below. 

I don't really understand the second question - when you bring in an image it will be in it's own layer, why would you need to create a layer??

My personal favorite way to bring images into an existing image is to simply drag and drop from Bridge. You can drag and drop and from the desktop too.

If you don't have a starting image and you want to bring them all in at once you can load as stack - you can do this from Bridge or from within Photoshop. This method assumes your images only have one layer.

  

[Bojan Živković · Accepted solution]

I am with @melissapiccone , and here are my $0.02. In Bridge, you have the option to show files from subfolders, which will save you tons of time.

Don't forget the Window > Filters tab, which can boost productivity when searching for certain types of files and more...