How can one use Apple’s new emojis in Photoshop?

Solution 1:

According to this answer on the graphic design Stack Exchange site, you can activate “Show Keyboard & Character Viewers in menu bar” under “System Preferences… > Keyboard” for easy access to character sets:

And then what you can do is type the emojis into TextEdit like this:

And then use “Export as PDF…” from the “File” menu in that document to export that emoji as a PDF and then import that PDF into Photoshop or Illustrator and you should have a nice and clean transparency.

Just note that I’m not 100% clear on whether it is best to increase the font size in the emoji in TextEdit to something close to what you want it to be rendered as in Photoshop or Illustrator. Or perhaps the PDF import process will treat that emoji “text” as scalable vector elements. But the overall concept should work fine; clunky but fine.