Photoshop's Lesser Known Tips for 75 Techniques - Guidelines and Rulers

Tips for Guides and Rulers When you drag a guide while holding a guide, you can switch between horizontal guides and vertical guides by holding down the Alt key. Hold down the Alt key and click on an existing vertical guide to turn it into a horizontal guide and vice versa.

Note: The guides are created by dragging from the ruler, so make sure the ruler is open [Ctrl+R] (View » Show Rulers ).

Pressing the Shift key while dragging a guideline will force it to snap to the scale on the ruler.

Double-click on a guide to open the Guides & Styles Preferences dialog [Ctrl+K, Ctrl+6] ( File » Preferences » Guides & Grid... ).

Double-click the ruler [Ctrl+R] to open the Unit & Ruler Parameter Settings dialog [Ctrl+K, Ctrl+5] ( File » Preferences » Units & Rulers... ).

Tip: You can also select the scale unit in the options menu on the information panel.

The coordinate origin of the ruler can be set anywhere on the canvas, as long as you drag from the upper left corner of the ruler to apply a new coordinate origin; double-click the upper left corner to restore the coordinate origin to the default point.

It is also a good idea to use the path tool to create the auxiliary lines for curves and slashes. Just draw the path with the pen tool as a guideline when drawing or painting (the path is always visible).

Tip: Use the hidden path command [Ctrl+Shift+H] (View » Hide Path) to toggle the path display or not.

The auxiliary lines not only snap to the edges of the current layer or selection (up, down, left, and right), but they also align with the horizontal or vertical center (of the current layer or selection). The reverse is also true: the same selections and layers will also be adsorbed to existing auxiliary lines (edge ​​and center).

Note: The guides do not stick to the background layer. And to implement this feature, first open the Ctrl+Shift+; (View » Snap To Guides) option.

Tip: To find the center of the screen, you can create a new layer with [Ctrl+Shift+N] (Layer » New Layer...) and fill it with a layer [Shift+Backspace] (Edit » Fill...) and then snap the guideline to vertical Center and horizontal center.