Photoshop
Interface
Guides, Grid & Slices Preferences
This set of preferences sets the colour, style and spacing of the grid lines, as well as the colour and style of the guides and slices.
View a full-sized version of the Guides, Grid & Slices preferences.
Guides
We discuss using guides in a later module so we'll summarize it here by saying that guides are non-printing lines that you can set in an image to help you in aligning your content. They can be horizontal and/or vertical. In the example shown here, guides have been set along the edges of the object.
- Colour
- You can choose from a number of guide colours from the drop-down menu or use the Custom option in the menu to display a colour picker and choose your own colour. Either way, your colour selection will be displayed in the swatch to the right.
- Style
- Guides can appear as solid or dashed lines.
- Smart Guides
- Smart Guides are a more sophisticated version of guides. You can set the guide colour just as you did with regular guides.
Grid
Like guides, the grid is used to help you lay out and align elements in an image. This mockup of the grid shows that the grid appears on top of the image layers. Like the Guides Colour option, there is a drop-down menu with preset colours and a Custom option to let you choose your own colour.
- Colour
- The default colour of the gridlines is grey but for our mockup we used magenta. Whatever colour you choose, it should be different than the guide colour so you can tell them apart. There should also be enough contrast between the grid colour and the colours in the image for better visibility.
- Style
- Gridlines can appear as solid, dashed or lines.
- Gridline Every
- Here you set the distance between gridlines. Enter a value and select a unit of measurement from the drop-down menu. The gridlines are the darker magenta lines in our image mockup.
- Subdivisions
- The number entered for this option sets the number of times you want to divide the space between each two gridlines. They appear in a lighter colour. In our example, this value was 2.
Slices
Images can be subdivided into slices when you want to place each slice in a separate cell of an HTML table. Why would you want to do this? For example, in a web page header, you might want one specific slice to be clickable, such as a logo, to take you back to the home page.
- Line Colour
- Each image slice is surrounded by a coloured border so you can see where the image has been sliced. Like guides and gridlines, these will only display while the file is open in Photoshop. Choose a colour option from the drop-down menu to set the border colour.
- Show Slice Numbers
- With this option enabled, each slice will be tagged with its own non-printable number. When you publish a sliced image and its HTML code in the ImageReady application, the names of the image slices will be appended with the slice number. This will occur whether you enable this option or not but it makes it easier to correlate the HTML code with the image slices with slice numbering enabled.
Guides, Grid & Slices Preferences Summary
- The Guides, Grid & Slices Preferences sets the appearance of guides, the grid and image slices.
- The Guides options set the colour and line style of guides.
- The Smart Guides option sets the colour of smart guides.
- The Grid options set the grid colour, line style, grid spacing, and the number of subdivisions between gridlines.
- The Slices options set the colour of the slice borders and lets you choose whether to display slice numbers.
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