Align Objects

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Sometimes in an image, you really want elements to line up. For example, when you're digital scrapbooking, you'd just love that ribbon to end exactly at the top of the page!

Photoshop Elements offers some help with this, sometimes snapping objects to what it thinks is the nearest sensible place.

There's the problem though. It's only what Photoshop thinks. You have very little control over it.

So here's a way to make sure that you can line things up yourself, without having to zoom in to 1600% and moving things pixel by pixel!

Aligning Objects

Select the Move Tool, and you'll see three buttons on the option bar that look like this:

These buttons each display drop down menus for positioning objects in various ways.

The first button, 'Arrange', can be used to reposition layers relative to each other. An example would be shifting a layer to the back of the image. This is just a convenience really, as the same effect can be achieved by dragging the layers up or down in the layers palette.

The next button, 'Align', is the button we are interested in. This allows you to align any of the edges of the layers, or their horizontal or vertical centers.

To use this option, select the layers containing the objects that you want to align, holding the Ctrl key to enable you to select more than one layer.

Now that multiple layers are selected, the options under the align button become active. Now just click on, for example, 'Left Edges' to align the left edges of the layers.

There's one more operation that can be even more difficult than aligning the edges of objects, and that is spacing them evenly. Doing this by eye can be a nightmare, but the last button, 'Distribute', can help us.

For the options under this last button to be available, at least three layers must be selected. Pressing one of the horizontal distribute options will evenly space the layers between the left-most and right-most edges.

If you're struggling to visualise all this, then the image below demonstrates the effect. Here we have some badly positioned lines, which we want to evenly space and align. The commands that have been used are shown.

I hope you've found this tip useful! Any questions or comments, just get in touch with my Contact Form.

Kind Regards

Robert Redwood Robert Redwood - Bio
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