377 Two ways to create center guides in Photoshop

- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to 2015 not to mention the fifth consecutive year of Deke's Techniques. Now today rather than showing you a wicked cool effect, I'm gonna step back and focus on a practical technique that you'll be using all the time inside Photoshop, namely how to create two guides; one vertical, and one horizontal smack dab in the center of any image regardless of its size or resolution. I'm actually going to show you two ways to pull this off.

We'll start with the conventional nine-step technique. Lots of people know about this one, and then I'll show you the little known four-step technique that takes about half the time. Here, let me show you exactly how they work. All right, let's start with the conventional method for creating center guides in Photoshop. I've gone ahead and listed out every single one of the nine steps here for the sake of reference, but I am going to go through each and every one of them. The first step is to go up to the select menu, and choose the All command, or more easily you can press the keyboard shortcut, Control-A or Command-A on a Mac.

Next, what we want to do is go to the edit menu, and choose Free Transform. Problem is that the command is dimmed because I do not have a pixel-based layer selected at the moment. You're generally best off clicking in the background here inside the Layers panel, and then as a third step you can go up to the Edit menu, and now successfully choose Free Transform. That goes ahead and displays this origin point right here at the center of the canvas. Now, you want to go up to the View menu, and choose Rulers.

Then drag out a horizontal guide followed by a vertical guide, or, of course, you can do it in the opposite order. In any case, you want them to snap into alignment with that central origin point. Now, we're done with the Free Transform mode so you can press the Escape key in order to escape out of the mode. Then, assuming that you no longer want to see the rulers on screen, press Control-R, or Command-R on a Mac in order to hide them, and then finally you want to go to the Select menu, and choose the deselect command.

Incidentally, if you're not seeing your guides at this point, then you want to go to the View menu, choose Show, and choose Guides, in order to make them visible. All right, so those are the nine steps associated with the conventional method. Now let me show you the better way to work. I'll go up to the File menu, and choose the Revert command in order to restore the saved version of the image. Here, by the way, are the four steps that we'll be taking advantage of right here. Let me show you how those work.

I'll go ahead and switch back to the image of the moon by itself here. Notice, this time it doesn't matter which layer is selected. You can go up to the View menu, and choose New Guide. Notice that you can either create a horizontal or vertical guide, and you can specify its position in pixels, or some other unit of measure including percent. I can enter 50 percent like so, and then click OK, and we've got ourselves a horizontal center guide. Then, I'd go back to the View menu, choose New Guide again, and this time I'll switch to vertical, and, once again, enter 50 percent, and click OK.

That's all there is to it. I am now done. Now, let's say I want to use those center guides to select the moon. I would switch from the rectangular marquee tool to the elliptical marquee, and then I'd start dragging right there at the intersection of those two guides, and I'll press the Alt key or the Option key as I drag in order to draw the ellipse from the center outward like so. Just remember, these are the four steps required to create center guides in the most expedient manner possible here inside Photoshop.

My favorite thing about that second four-step technique is that you can record it as an action after which point you can play it back as a one-step technique. If you're a member of the Lynda.com online training library, I have a couple of follow-up movies. In the first one, I show you yet another way to create center guides that only works in Photoshop CC. In the second movie, I show you how to create center guides in Adobe Illustrator. If you're waiting for next week, we're gonna turn our attention for once to InDesign where I'll show you how to search for the perfect font without that list of recently used fonts getting in your way.

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