Photoshop Basics: Using Guides

Guides are very useful when you are lining up elements in an image. When creating centered text, it is useful to have a vertical guide line to follow. Both vertical and horizontal guides have many uses in layouts, and also when rotating an image. Your camera might have been slightly tilted when you photographed a building, for example. Using Photoshop, you can rotate the image in small degree increments until it is correctly oriented. Best of all, guides overlay your image. They are not part of your image. So you can add them, move them about, and delete them without affecting your image.

To create a guide, choose menu entry View > New Guide. The dialog box will appear:

Choose a position, then vertical or horizontal. It's easier to type in the position first, using tenths, hundredths etc. for fine positioning. Unless you positioned it off-screen, your guide line should appear. I almost always check View > Rulers so that I can see the rulers around my image. These help you when positioning guides. Now that you have at least one guide on the screen, select the Move tool and practice moving the guide around. If you drag a guide beyond one of the rulers, you are in effect deleting that guide.

Here are 2 guides, one vertical and one horizontal, each positioned at 2 inches:

Position your guide(s) where you want them. Then to rotate the image, in this example using Photoshop Elements, select menu entry Image > Rotate > Custom. The following dialog box will appear:

The dialog might say Right/Left, or CW (Clockwise)/CCW (Counterclockwise), depending on your version of Photoshop. You might need to rotate your image several times to get into the correct position. Finally, use the Crop tool to trim off the blank areas exposed by the rotation.

Copyright © 2013 Philip N. Wheeler. All Rights Reserved.

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