From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Guide shortcuts: Diptych, Whitney

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

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Guide shortcuts: Diptych, Whitney

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- [Instructor] Hello and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode, we are going to talk about guides in Photoshop. And here, I wanna highlight a few guide shortcuts, and then do a small project where we create a diptych, that is two photographs side-by-side. We'll work with these photographs and we'll create that over here. Alright, well first, let me just go to this blank document here, and press f to go to full screen mode, and let's talk about how we can begin to find or work with guides. Well, first what you need to do is to show the ruler. So you can do that by pressing cmd + r on a Mac or ctrl + r on Windows. And you can see there's a ruler on the top and also over here on the left. To bring a guide out, just click and drag. If you want to remove it, just click and drag it back in this way. If you want to work a little bit more efficiently, what you can do is, you can click and drag out, and if you realize that rather than a horizontal guide you want a vertical one, just hold down the option key on a Mac, alt on Windows, and click, and in this way, you can see how I can change the guide. Or, if you option or alt + click and drag out, it will come out in that other orientation. Well let's say we have a bunch of guides out because we're creating some kind of a layout, and we decide that we want to hide those. How do we do that? Well, by way of a shortcut, that's cmd + ; on a Mac, ctrl + ; on Windows. Well, currently, we have these guides, and they are on a white background, so they're a little bit difficult to see. To change the color, go to your preferences, and go to the area for guides, and when you get there, you can choose a different color. Let's say like black, and then now that shows up a little bit better on the white. So sometimes you may need to customize those as well. What about clearing them all away? Hopefully, go to the view pull down menu. There is an option for clearing guides. 'Cause sometimes you'll just say, hey, you know what, I have too many guides, I want to gid rid of them. Now, they are gone. Well, let's take a look at one more feature under the view pull down menu. And this one's kinda fun, it's called, new guide layout. If we click on that, it will open up a dialogue menu, which gives us the ability to add columns or rows. Now, what I wanna do is, I mentioned, is create a diptych, which is two images side-by-side. So I'm gonna go ahead and just enter in a few values here. And, I'm gonna change this, let's say I'll add a little margin, and my margin's going to be .5, that's gonna be the border around the edge. And I'm gonna use these guides to be able to create a nice, clean layout. Sometimes guides are useful for creating layouts, or maybe if you want to layout something from a design perspective, or create an ad, or work with photographs, or something like that. So here, I'm just making sure the space in-between all of these is identical. You can see how I really quickly created the space. I'm gonna have one image right here, and then another image over here. And I was able to do that by using this new guide layout. Now, what you'll wanna do is, if you haven't ever used this, is just open it up and tinker around, and you'll start to see how it works. And what you can do is customize the guide layout that you have, and then click ok. Now this hasn't added anything to the document. Guides are really invisible. They're just there for you, no one would see this if we were to print the file. But I'm gonna use these in order to create my layout. So here I'll press shift + f to go back to where I can see all of my images. And I'll use the move tool, and click into one of them, and I'll drag and drop that over into my document here. Click into another one and drag and drop that one over there as well. Alright, well now that I have those, I'll press f to go to full screen, and you can see that these images are clearly too big. No big deal, what we're going to do is resize them so they fit inside of that space. Yet, before we do that, let's just take a look at this for a second. Can you see how I have the black guides right here? Well, I can use that to make a selection, because if I make a selection, the selection's gonna snap right to that. Did you see how it snapped right to that space? Then I can say, hey, on this layer, let's create a layer mask. So now this image is only showing within that space there. I'll do the same thing with the other one down below. And I'm gonna do that over here on this side. And you're maybe wondering, well, what to do with the situation where we have this image but it's too big and it's not in the right spot? Well, that's what we'll talk about next. But right now, you can see we have images which are within that space. Now we need to customize it. Well, when you have an image and a mask, you can unlink those two by clicking on the link icon here. Use your move tool and then click and drag to move this around. Or, if we need to resize this, we can use our resize shortcut, which is cmd + t on a Mac, or ctrl + t on Windows. I'm gonna go ahead and just resize that one so it fits inside of that space. And as you can see, this is now fitting perfectly inside of those guides right there. Let's do the same thing with the other one. So again, you click into the layer, unlink the mask and the image, so we click on the link icon. Make sure you're not on the mask, so we wanna be on the image itself, command + t on a Mac, control + t on Windows, and you can see this image was much too big, but sometimes that happens, right, when you bring images over, they're not quite the right size. And so here I'm just gonna go ahead and resize that. Zoom in a little bit so we can see this a touch better. And, just get that right where I want it, maybe something like that. And then press enter or return. So now at this point, we have created our project, and we learned a thing or two about guides. Now the only problem is, the guides are here for us, right? The viewer, at the end of the day, won't see these. So I need to temporarily hide those. Do you remember the shortcut for that? That's command + ; on a Mac, or control + ; on Windows. That then hides the guides. If I wanna hide the rulers, I press command + r on a Mac, or control + r on Windows. And now, I have finished my project, and hopefully, you picked up a few tips about working with guides as well.

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