Today’s tip is all about using your align options in Photoshop. As far as I know all versions of Photoshop (Elements and CS’s) have the align options. Whether you are dragging in elements, alphas seperately, or pictures there are going to be times you want them perfectly aligned! It is very quick and easy to do in Photoshop! When you have the MOVE tool selected after dragging in your elements, alphas, or pictures you can go up to your top tool bar and you should see these:
Those are your cool little align tools. You should be able to tell that one aligns to the left, one to the right, one center aligns vertically, one center aligns horizontally, and then there are two that distribute vertical and horizontal centers. If you hold your cursor over those icons in Photoshop they will tell you what they do!
To align objects, once you have two or more images in Photoshop or Elements in your scrapbook page, you can select the layers you want to align by holding down the ctrl key while selecting the correct layers over in the layer palette.
Once you see the layers you want to align selected you can click on the appropriate align button that you want. This will arrange your objects so that they are perfectly aligned.
Using the same technique, you can align objects by any of the four edges: top, bottom, left or right sides by clicking on the icon in the Options bar.
Keep in mind that this is a very handy tool, but when you are aligning a word, lets say, of alphas it may not be so accurate to align them necessarily to the bottom. If there is a P, a Y or a letter that has a stick going down it will mess it up a bit, so you will need to do some of your own playing around with alphas sometimes!
For me I use the tool a lot when I am matting two papers on a LO – one that is a bit smaller than the other – as my background. I can easily select both papers and do a quick center align vertical and a quick center align horizontal and I knwo that my papers are perfectly centered on my page!
Hopefully a few of you have never played with your align buttons before, or never knew what those funny little lines and boxes meant up at the top of your tool bar! Go play around with them – they are pretty fun!
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