You’ll feel an object pop into place as you move it towards a guide or grid line.Īfter the object aligns to a guide, you can gently move it along that line to snap it into place with other guides, too. Turning on snapping makes the guides almost work like magnets with the edges of the objects. To make an object “snap” onto a guide or grid choose View > Snap. Note that these objects are all on separate layers. In the example below, the blue Smart Guide appears when I move the apple shadow (which is the bottom of the apple illustration) in line with the baseline of the text “Apple”. To turn on Smart Guides by choosing View > Show > Smart Guides.

They’re great for helping with graphic design layout. When you use them for the first time, Smart Guides can be a little confusing, but as you get used to them you’ll see that they are a really useful tool for aligning objects nicely on your document. For example, if you were moving an object (let’s say a photograph) around, and the top of the photo aligned with the top, or centre, or bottom of another object (let’s say a piece of text), then a guide will appear telling you what that relationship is. Smart Guides are special guides that appear onscreen when certain spatial relationships occur between objects on your document. To get rid of all the guides, choose View > Clear Guides. If you want to get rid of an individual guide simply click on it with the Move tool and then drag it back onto the ruler.ħ. To make sure you don’t accidentally move your guides once you’re happy with their position, you can lock them into position by choosing View > Lock Guides from the menu.Ħ. Click and press on an existing guide and drag it to a new position.ĥ. If you want to reposition a guide, select the Move tool (V) in the Tools panel. (see more on Photoshop preferences near the end of this article)Ĥ. The colour of your guide line will depend on your preference settings. Let go to drop the guide wherever you want it. The cursor changes to a double arrow, and the guide will appear as a thin line as you drag it into position. To place a guide on the image, click on a ruler (either the horizontal at the top or the vertical on the left) and drag a guide out. Ok, now your rulers are visible, you can drag the guides out.ģ.

A pop-up menu will appear and you can choose the units. If you want to change the unit of measurement of your ruler, right-click on either the horizontal or vertical ruler. To turn the rulers off again just hit the same keyboard shortcut. A ruler will appear along the top and along the left-hand side of the interface. To show or hide rulers in Photoshop, choose View > Rulers or press Cmd + R (Mac) or Ctrl + R (Windows). When I was making this poster, I used guidelines to line up all the text, the logo and the dark hairline at the bottom left of the poster.

You set up these guidelines by dragging out from the rulers at the top and side of the workspace, so the first step is to make sure your rulers are visible. In Photoshop you can use guidelines to help you line up images, text or shapes in your document. Guides and grids don’t show up when you save your file for print or screen, so you don’t have to worry about deleting them.Ĭlick Here To Download Photoshop Free 7 Day Trial These tools are the guides, grids and rulers. Photoshop provides us with a set of tools that make it simple to place components in the right spots. It doesn’t seem to affect dragging a guide, since it would mean snapping a guide to another guide which would put them on top of each other.One of the easiest ways to improve your designs, whether they are for print or screen, is to align visual elements. No, that controls whether a layer you drag snaps to a guide. One thing that can affect snap to center is that if a lot of Snap To options are on and layers already exist, a guide might snap to layer edges that are close to the center, making it difficult to lock on the center order for the guide to automatically snap to the center, should I have been using the Snap To > Guide? In other words, Snap To controls what get snapped, and Snap toggles what you set up in Snap To. For example, if only three of the options on View > Snap To are selected, View > Snap toggles those three on or off together. View > Snap is a master toggle switch for all selected items on the View > Snap To submenu. I found what Semaphoric said to be true, if I drag a guide too fast it might overshoot the center snap zone before it can snap, but if I drag slower I can see the displayed position value stop and hold near the center as it is the difference between Snap and Snap To.

Photoshop ruler tool line missing