Web Media Magazine - Web development magazine, including Photoshop tutorials, PHP tutorials, CSS tutorials, web news and trends.

Grids, Guides & Alignment

posted by John Owen on July 5th, 2009, in Basics, Photoshop | 4 Comments

This tutorial will show you how to use grids, guides and the alignment tools. These three options will keep your designs accurate and stop you using the nudge tool all the time to get your layers in place, which can be frustrating at times. Each option is used for a different situation, guides are used for designing websites whereas grids are used in general practices and the alignment options are for small scale operations (such as centering text).

Grids

To set up a grid head over to the Edit menu and select Preferences. Navigate to Guides, Grids & Slices.

In the grid panel, you can set the options. If I have a 20 x 20 cm canvas and I wanted a 2.5cm grid I would set the Gridline every: to 2.5 cm. The subdivisons lets you set how many grid lines are in every sqaure for further accuracy. To enable to grids go to View > Show > Grid

You can also set the colos or the grid lines and the subdivisons which can be helpful. When you move layers around on the canvas with grids enabled the layer should automatically snap to the line if you have Snap enabled.

Guides

Guides create lines in either horizontal or vertical directions all the way through the canvas. You can set how far in the line is by a percentage or unit. To show guides go to View > Show > Guides. To create a new guide to to View > New Guide.

The guides tool as you can see is very versatile, it lets you enter any unit you want such as pixels or percentage. If you have show guides enabled then you should see a blue line appear. To change the color of the guides go to the preferences panel. As before, if you have Snap enbabled then any layer you drag near a guide will snap to it.

To delete guides, drag the guide with the Move Tool outside of the working area (not just the canvas).

Alignment

As you can see this text need to be centered

Now, many people have seen these alignment tools but don’t know how to use them. It’s actually very simple. First off select the Marquee Tool (M). Create a selection around the whole canvas.

Select the layer you want to center and select the move tool.

If you have enough common sense you’ll relise what each button does. The ones with both sqaures in the middle of the line means center of horizontal and vertical. Click both these two to center the text layer.

The text is now centered, the tool works off the current selection so you can center the layer in any part of the image or to the left or right etc…

Finish! If you have any questions just comment!