Tip: Use The Grid in Photoshop

Today’s Photoshop tip will show you how to take advantage of the “Grid” feature in Photoshop. The Grid is the perfect alignment tool for graphic design, and is very easy to use. By combining the use of the Grid with the “Snap” feature, users can perfectly align objects along grid lines and sudivisions.

Enabling the Grid

Open up the document you’d like to work with (or create a new document), and enable the Grid by checking View > Extras, and then checking View > Show > Grid.

You should now see a grid laid over your canvas. The grid lines are not actually a part of your image, they are more or less just reference lines.

Note: The Grid Lines are the darker lines. The light, dotted lines are known as “Subdivisions”.

Grid Preferences

Perhaps you need to adjust the grid to better suit your working conditions. It’s very easy to setup grid lines to distance themselves in inches, pixels, as well as other standard measurement units.

To adjust the Grid Preferences, go to Edit > Preferences > Guides, Grid & Slices…

From here, you can adjust the Grid Color, Style (Lines, Dashed Lines, Dotted Lines), the distance between grid line, and the number of subdivisions between grid lines.

Snap to Grid

Snapping is a useful feature in Photoshop that allows users to align layers, shapes, text, etc, perfectly with other objects, guides, or in our case the grid.

To enable Snap to Grid, first Enable Snap (View > Snap), and then make sure Snap to Grid is checked (View > Snap To > Grid).

You should now be able to easily align your different layers with the grid PRECISELY.

You may want to take note that enabling snapping will ALWAYS have objects snap to the grid, other layers, or whatever else Snap To is set up for. You will often find it necessary to disable snap while working with certain graphics.