There will eventually come a time when you will need to create a texture with loads of detail, that carry exact measurements from end to end. Usually it takes a good eye and a steady hand to draw these details out by hand, but if you suffer from "too-much-coffee mouse" like I do then rulers and guides are truly the savior of texture artists everywhere. These handy built-in Photoshop tools aid in several tasks faced by most intermediate to advanced texture artists, and if you're just now wanting to learn the secrets of the gurus then rulers and guides are the tools to use. We'll jump into setting up your rulers first, but before we do, some customization is in order.

    Let's open up your Preferences by going through the Edit > Preferences menu, and opening up Units & Rulers. From here, you can specify your units of measure and the type (by default, rulers are set to inches and points). Since you'll be working on textures where every pixel counts, you will probably want to change your ruler's unit of measure to pixels and leave the type set at "points". You'll also want to keep your columns and pixels/picas settings where they are, as they apply more to print measurements.

    Now that our ruler definitions are set, go ahead and open an image to try it out. We can enable them in every project window by either going to View > Show Ruler or by pressing "CTRL + R". move your cursor over the open canvas and notice your ruler positions on the horizontal and vertical rulers to the top and left. Nifty, huh?

    Things are about to get even more practical. Lets go back to Edit > Preferences and choose Guides & Grid. I suggest using the settings shown here. To better explain how these two items function, guides are used to define a line horizontally or vertically to trace by or set coordinates at intersecting lines. The grid is obviously just that, given you have the flexibility to set your margins for your rows and columns.

    Once everything is set up, create a new image at 256 pixels wide by 256 high so we can start learning how to use grids and guides effectively (to make things easier to see, I've filled the canvas with black). Try viewing your grid by pressing "CTRL + ALT + ' ", or going through the View menu as with the ruler. With your grid up and visible, lets set up some guides.

    Unfortunately, there is no shortcut key I know of to add a new guide, So you'll have to go though the View menu every time and select New Guide. Do so and set the first guide to 32 pixels (vertical is set by default). Set another guide at 64 pixels, then two more at 192 pixels and 224 pixels respectively. Now use the same measurements to set the guides horizontally. When you're finished, the guides on your image should look like this.

    Great, now we're going to press the "L" key to select the "Polygonal Lasso" tool, and follow the guides to make the pattern shown here. You'll notice how the tool will "snap" it's lines to the major guide points. This helps a tremendous amount with accuracy. Just to show how effective this is; I adjusted the brightness of the two selections, added 2 points of noise to each, and detailed the edges of the selections with the Dodge tool ("O" key) to get this.

    Now, given that little simple texture took about 2 minutes to make, imagine how cool and complex you can set up your guides and layers if you spend some time on them. Just to give you an example, here's an outline from one of my textures. I recommend saving your patterns and outlines, or converting them to vector stencils for later use, because you'll probably use them repeatedly.

What are you still sitting around for!?! Go make some cool textures!

Questions or comments? E-mail Mr. Lake