Aligning your layout

I will admit, this isn't something I learned or used until recently when I got into designing templates.  Now I wish I had used it much more often!

In Photoshop, there is a super quick and easy way to keep everything aligned and even.

I'm going to share two different ways to line things up on your layout!

Let's pretend that you have 3 photos that you want to line up.  The first photo is large and you want the other two to line up so that together they would make one nice box.

I like to make my own squares first and line them up and then clip my photos to them.

First thing I'm going to do is the math!  Let's say I want my large photo to be 4x6 inches.  I would create a new image at 4 inches wide and 6 inches long at 300 dpi.  Then I would fill it with a color:

Now I'm going to create one more box half and a little less than this one.  If I want a half inch space between the two smaller photos, then I would make a new image with the dimensions of 4 inches (because our width isn't changing) and 2.75.  3 inches would be 1/2 of 6 inches and then I would want the two boxes to be a quarter of an inch smaller, giving a half inch in between.

Now put these images on your 12 by 12 inch layout and remember to place the smaller box on there twice.

At first glance, these look pretty lined up, but we're going for exact!  So, click on the layer of the large box and the top box and then go to layer>>Align>>Top Edges.  You'll notice them line right up.  Now do the same with the large box and the bottom one:

The last thing we want to do is make sure there is a 1/2 inch space between the large box and the two smaller ones.  To check this, we can click on View from the top menu and then choose Show>>Grid

This will put a grid over the whole thing and you can move the big box to be 1/2 inch away.  You can also use the grid from the beginning to line things up, but I wanted to show you several different options.