Finding Your Center
Having to find the center of your documents is something that comes up from time to time. It’s one of those tasks that can be accomplished in so many different ways making it debatable which method is the fastest and easiest.
Phototechniques.com recently posted this approach for finding the center of your Photoshop document:
Here’s a quick way to set guides to intersect at the center of a document. Choose View > New Guide. In the New Guide dialog box, click the Vertical button, and type 50% in the Position field. Repeat for the horizontal guide. Click OK, and you’re done.
I have to admit this way is rather elegant even if it has you going into the New Guide dialog box twice. But like I mentioned, there’s more than one way to find your center.
The method I’ve come up with and have used through the years is quite low end yet more interactive:
- Choose Select > All to create marquee selection around your entire document.
- Choose Select > Transform Selection which will switch your selection to transform mode, making available handles on all four corners of your selection as well as their midpoints along the horizontal and vertical. A center origin point (
) also appears. - Using these midpoint transform handles and the origin point as cues, you can quickly drag out a horizontal and vertical guide that snaps to the center origin point’s arms.
After you select Transform Selection, transform handles appear on the corners and midpoints of your selection.
Drag out horizontal and vertical guides to meet the center origin and the transform handles.What I like about my method is that it can be applied in other CS2 components but using rectangular objects in place of the marquee selection. For example, you can use the Rectangle tool in Illustrator or the Rectangle Frame tool in InDesign to draw out a rectangle to the artboard or page. The objects offer midpoint handles and origin points when the object is selected just like in Photoshop. It’s also a cheap trick when you want to quickly find the center of something inside a document. Lastly, you can group objects in InDesign CS2 to have these handles display for finding the relative center of the items in the group.
2 Comments
George on February 7th, 2006
Great points, Dan. Thanks. Yeah, I neglected to mention that you’ll want Snap Guides on (Shift+Command+; [Mac] or Shift+Control+; [Windows]) in order to make the most of this tip.
Dan Love on February 7th, 2006
After making a selection and activating the Free Transform function, make sure that snap is selected in the view menu and the guides you drag will “SNAP” to the handle like magic.
To cancel the Free Transform function press “ESC” and click in the document to lose the marching ants.