Inspiring

Open for Voting

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

Forum|Forum|14 years ago
April 29, 2011
81 replies
4267 views

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.

PECourtejoie

Community Expert

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.

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Brigitte23914987gcbi

Participating Frequently

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

Community Expert

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.

N

nicolasl55695402

Participant

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 ?

Kukurykus

Legend

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...

F

FeedbackCommunityMemberAuthor

Inspiring

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.

M

mhoffma

Participating Frequently

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!

F

FeedbackCommunityMemberAuthor

Inspiring

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

tiffanyw55422821

Participant

I would love to see the ability to set up different color guide lines for different layers in Photoshop as well. Lots of times I end up with too many guidelines and getting mixed up between them.

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

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

Community Expert

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

Dave

F

FeedbackCommunityMemberAuthor

Inspiring

YO!

Couple quick suggestions.

How about the guide rulers in Photoshop having a transparency value, would make life easier when you have a lot of em, working on designing a very symmetrical lineart logo and I can barely see the image even with the rulers that's just dots. =p

Being able to go between multiple different 'sets' of rulers and guides
would be pretty sweet too. Screen can get pretty crowded. Might make life a bit easier being able to attach sets of rulers and guides to layers or something. So you can easily display just the rulers that are relevant to what your working on.

Being able to set diagonal rulers of various angles would be pretty shweet. IE being able to set 'this ruler should be at 37 degrees' or whatever would be cool.

Perhaps even being able to fine tune the little 'distance marks' on the ruler on rulers on the side, how far apart each one is, being able to 'snap to' on a custom amount of pixels, or a custom amount of pixels from your starting position, would be some pretty handy options to have, especially in the initial stages of plotting something out.

Being able to set a 'symmetrical snap to' option from a 'starting ruler' would be pretty great too.

Was a couple things I noticed while working, and a couple things I just brainstormed. Hope I was able to help. =D

❤️ U BAI.

F

FeedbackCommunityMemberAuthor

Inspiring

I agree with selectively locking guides, either individual or by group. This would help a ton on responsive website designs. Make it happen Adobe!

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