Align disabled, why???

[Dotts]

Last week Adobe asked me if I would recommend their products to friends. My answer was highly unlikely because of the constant change of how features work and where to find them. I've been using Photoshop for over 30 years.

Today, it's making me furious again. On a deadline and suddenly ALL alignment is grayed out. Whatever layer I select, I cannot center it or align it with other layers. It happened after I did align something, did a few other things and whoops, feature is gone. I even started a new project, put a text on screen and yep, all alignment grayed out. Restarted Photoshop (2025 by the way, but also in 2024), to no avail. You can't make this up.

So there you have it. I would be extremely grateful if someone could help me.

[D Fosse]

put a text on screen and yep, all alignment grayed out.

By @Dotts

I don't think it was ever designed to work with vector data. Rasterize the text, and it works.

Whatever layer I select, I cannot center it or align it with other layers.

And since you don't say, I have to ask the obvious question: You did have both layers selected/active in the panel?

Don't know what else to say. I use auto-align all the time, and I've never seen it disabled. It may not align pixel perfect in all cases, and it may fail altogether if there's not sufficient overlap (in which case you get a message saying exactly that), - but it always runs.

[Dotts]

In this case I don't want to use auto align, where it snaps to all kinds of stuff while you move the layer around. I want to select the text layer and press the button that centers it in the screen. These buttons are grayed out. It used to work for almost 30 years, without having to rasterise the text. In the middle of a project (same file where it did work a few minutes before), it just stopped working and never got it to work again - even not in a new file. So I worked around it with auto-align but you never know if it accidentally aligned with something else, a few pixels off. Yes, I know that if you look carefully and pay a lot of attention, you can ensure that it snaps to the thing you want. But I'm not using my software tools to fiddle and eyeball, I want to quickly finish my work. That's why I want to avoid auto-align sometimes.

[Olaf Giermann · Accepted solution]

In order to align elements to each other by clicking on the buttons or using the menu-commands, you have to select at least two layers. 

If you want to align to the full canvas, you have to select all (Cmd-A) to make the align-options active.

This has never been different in Photoshop – at least in the last 20 years. 😉

[Dotts]

Thanks. I'm still pulling my hair out. As a video editor, I work with Premiere and After Effects on a daily basis, Photoshop just occasionally. When you select a layer in AE and nothing else, it automatically aligns it with the canvas because you haven't selected another object. In Photoshop, it just disables the feature with no explanation why. It's the same suite of products in the same montly subscription from the same company - how hard is it to make a consistent user interface?

That's why, when asked by Adobe, I don't recommend Adobe to new users because the programs in the suite all have their own behaviour anyway. Sorry for my ranting. It annoys me because it costs me money.

[PECourtejoie]

Hi, I would suggest to post an idea to gain that feature, to allow centering of a single element to the canvas without a select all. It makes sense as continuity with other software.

[Olaf Giermann]

Yeah, I agree. Photoshop's behavior is strange and non-intuitive in this regard.