Making Straight Lines Of Squares And Dots In Photoshop Elements

This is Kris with another one of those Tech-Tuesday-Slap-My-Head-Stories. When I was making some graphics for our first online classes, I wanted to make a straight line of squares (we like using squares because they’re pixels!). “This should be easy,” I thought. Well, at some point Deb looked at my file and taught me that there was an easier way to make a straight line of squares. Duh!

The Hard Way (Don’t Laugh!)

Select the Custom Shape tool (red arrow), pick the square shape (green arrow), and then duplicate the shape . . . several times (blue arrows). Duplicating takes some time. Line the squares up on a ruler line.

 

 

Select all the square layers and use the Move tool to distribute the squares evenly. Here is an image of the Move Tool Options bar.

 

 

The Easy Way

Select the Brush Tool, then in the Brush Tool Options bar, select one of the square brushes (red arrow). Open the Brush Settings dialog box (blue arrow).

 

 

 

In the Brush Settings dialog box, move the spacing option slider (red arrow above) to change the distance between each point of the brush. In my example below, the spacing was 199% and scatter was 0. Press and hold the Shift key and then draw your straight line. Adjust the size of the brush and/or the spacing on the brush settings to achieve different looks.

 

 

Oh, and this works with virtually every brush, so you can quickly make straight lines of circles, diamonds, ovals, and even butterflies, like I did in the image at the top of the post. It took me way longer to write this post than to make all of the lines (and that includes picking out brushes and colors!) Have fun making straight lines of all kinds of things!

By the way, registration for our online course, Photoshop Elements: Essentials 2, is still open. Click here for more information and to register for class.