P: Custom Guides (groupable, colorable, nameable guides)

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Hi! I've been thinking this for quite a while, and I know most of the web designers out there have the same need... groupable, colorable, nameable guides.

It's important to use guides. But sometimes it gets a little messy.

What would be perfect is if guides had their own layer-style format. And each group, or layer, had an asigned color. You could turn on and off visibility of specific groups, or just turn them all off by hitting cmd + H, as we do today.

This would make photoshop THE perfect software for web design.

[davescm]

That does not sound like a bad idea . Unfortunately the guide colour can be changed but not for each layer

You can make a feature request at the link below where it is more likely to be seen by Adobe.

Photoshop Family Customer Community

In the meantime you could stroke a path onto a temporary layer as a guide - or use the count tool to "label" your guides with a number

Dave

[Trevor.Dennis]

Tiffany, I actually owe you my thanks.  As Dave said, Guides as such, are part of Photoshop, and while there are third party guide managers out there, we can only set guide colour globally.  However, Adobe gave us an improved Guide layout tool a couple of updates ago, and we can save custom set ups, and swap quickly between them.

Under the drop-down there is a check box to Clear existing guides so with that checked, clicking on a different custom preset lets you quickly swap guides, and you can do this with an Action triggered by a keyboard shortcut.  That's a pretty workable solution.  You can even share presets with your other computer or with colleges by send the .gds file for them to 'Load'

Before we had this tool, many of us used an excellent plugin called GuideGuide, but I have never manage do successfully install it since CC 2014.  The reason I started by saying I owe you my thanks, is because we like to check before making definitive statements, and that led me to discovering Griddify.  It installed into CC 2017, and adds more functionality to guides

BTW  Watch the video all the way to the end — especially if you build websites (I expect I am the only person here who didn't know about this Extension )

Griddify, a Tiny Photoshop Panel for Guides and Grids

AFAICT from a quick play with it, the main advantage is that we can space our guides according to a selection or wrap a selection with guides.  So in my screen shot it placed four guides to divide the selection into four equal columns and rows, and four more guides that wrapped the outer edge of the selection.

You can put multiple numbers in the fields so that the setting below placed a guide every 100 pixels, and then another 10 pixels further on, and one more another 10 pixels.  That's pretty cool

[davescm]

Thanks Trevor - I use Photoshop almost every day and had missed that one (looks embarrassed .......)

Dave

[Trevor.Dennis]

Which one Dave?  I didn't mention it in post #3 but Bert Monroy brings angled guides into Photoshop from Illustrator to help him get the perspective and shadow placement spot on in his Gigapixel illustrations.

When I was raving about Griddify, I should have qualified its ability to wrap guides around a selection, against Photoshop's New Guides from Shape feature.

We can also snap a guide to a layer's center point by bringing up its Transform handles.   That's something that pretty much everyone will know, but it just might have helped a person or two.

[davescm]

Hi Trevor

I knew about the New Guides from Shape  but it was the use of the New Guide Layout presets that had gone straight past me

(You not sleeping again - it must be around 2am there is it? )

Dave

[Barb Binder]

I, on the other hand, did not know about new guides from shape!

[Trevor.Dennis]

davescm wrote:

Hi Trevor

(You not sleeping again - it must be around 2am there is it? )

Dave

It's past 4.30am now, and this is the third time I've been up.  This time with one of my cats on my head.  Literally on my head!  I can't put him out because he gets into scraps, but he is definitely getting shut in his little room now.

Simon's Cat is completely true to life up to the point where the bat comes out.  He doesn't tug on my ear, but he gives it a good prod with his claws out.

[tiffanyw55422821]

Wow!! Thank you all for the helpful hints and tips!! I will give them a try, thanks!!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Photoshop : Option to choose multi coloured guides and sets of user determined guides

[mhoffma]

I'd love to see a few basic improvements to the Guide Layout dialog box and the guides in general.

From easy to more complex:

1. Have a "make all settings the same" button under New Guide Layout for the Margin area similar to the indesign file setup. Most of the time I want to have all those settings the same.

2. Allow me to right click on a guide and change its color.

3. Allow me to make "Guide Groups" I can layer on each other with options for color for each group. 

Thanks!
 

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

While designing a layout, is common to group layers and move groups, if the guides you select are inside a particular group you can continue the design after adjusting the canvas size, for example while designing a web site.

[Kukurykus]

It would be much better you posted images illustrating that you want to say. For now it's hard for me to imagine how that should be looking you wish to have in Photoshop...

[nicolasl55695402]

Hi,
sorry to come late in the chat.

Form me, groups layer with colors is a good idea, but having dozen of new layers in the layers control panel suns not great (even if they should be hidden by layer filters panel).

A new tool for guides could be interesting.
Guide selection, change color on right click so group them by the way. Remove by delete key once selected.

Anyway if to much guides are needed, it's time to go on inDesign ! 🙂

But I came here for a different reason, concerning guides too.

Is there a way to have main guides : guides over all artboards ?

[Brigitte23914987gcbi]

Would be very useful to be able to have different colours for the guidelines, especially when you need lots of them and they are very close to each other.

[Michael Bullo]

Not sure if this is one of those "so dumb but it kinda works" ideas…

Using the Single Row and Single Column Marquee Tools you can easily make selections a single pixel wide. You could target different layers and fill these selections with different colours.

[Brigitte23914987gcbi]

Thanks, it would work, but I need something that's a little less fastidious, that's built in the guide layout even.

[Michael Bullo]

Agreed 🙂

[jane-e]

@Brigitte23914987gcbi 

It's a reasonable request and is possible in Illustrator where the guides are the same color as their layer. I've upvoted.

Jane

[Stephen_A_Marsh]

Hi Michael,

Some work has been done in this area, I have the following script in my archive:

// https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2360122

//Requires Photoshop CS5 or newer
#target photoshop;

if (documents.length) app.activeDocument.suspendHistory('Stroke Guides', 'main()');

function main() {
    activeDocument.artLayers.add();
    activeDocument.activeLayer.name = "Stroked Guides";
    app.showColorPicker();
    var newColour = app.foregroundColor;
    var guideSize = Window.prompt("Please enter Stroke Size!", "1");
    var guides = app.activeDocument.guides;
    var guideArray = [];

    for (var g = 0; g < guides.length; g++) {
        singleLine(guides[g].direction.toString(), Number(guides[g].coordinate.value).toFixed(0));
        if (Number(guideSize) > 1)
            activeDocument.selection.stroke(newColour, Number(guideSize), StrokeLocation.OUTSIDE, ColorBlendMode.NORMAL, 100, false);
        activeDocument.selection.stroke(newColour, Number(guideSize), StrokeLocation.INSIDE, ColorBlendMode.NORMAL, 100, false);
    }
    
    activeDocument.selection.deselect();

    app.runMenuItem(stringIDToTypeID('clearGuides'));
};

function singleLine(pos, pixelPos) {
    var desc5 = new ActionDescriptor();
    var ref4 = new ActionReference();
    ref4.putProperty(charIDToTypeID('Chnl'), charIDToTypeID('fsel'));
    desc5.putReference(charIDToTypeID('null'), ref4);
    var desc6 = new ActionDescriptor();
    if (pos == "Direction.VERTICAL") {
        desc6.putUnitDouble(charIDToTypeID('Left'), charIDToTypeID('#Pxl'), Number(pixelPos));
        desc5.putObject(charIDToTypeID('T   '), charIDToTypeID('Sngc'), desc6);
    } else {
        desc6.putUnitDouble(charIDToTypeID('Top '), charIDToTypeID('#Pxl'), Number(pixelPos));
        desc5.putObject(charIDToTypeID('T   '), charIDToTypeID('Sngr'), desc6);
    }
    executeAction(charIDToTypeID('setd'), desc5, DialogModes.NO);
};

[PECourtejoie]

I wanted to point out new enhancements to guides in the 23.4 version: 

https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/photoshop/using/grid-guides.html#guides-enhancement-june2022

This includes the ability to colorize and edit guides via new keyboard shortcuts and a new context menu.

You can also delete guides with the Delete key and multi-select guides to edit and move them.

New dialog boxes include the option to colorize individual or multi-selected guides, making identification and visual isolation of guides much easier.

multi-select by clicking option + shift (Mac) or Alt + Shift (Win). Right-click and select Edit Selected Guides from the context menu.