Professional Documents
Culture Documents
This displays Photoshop's rulers along the top and left of the document. Depending on what
measurement type your rulers are set to in Photoshop's Preferences, they're probably displaying either
pixels or inches. Move your mouse cursor into the rulers, either along the top or the left, then Right-
click (Win) / Control-click (Mac) inside the rulers and choose Percent from the list. You'll see the
rulers change to percentage increments:
Right-click (Win) / Control-click (Mac) inside the rulers and select Percent from the list.
Step 4: Drag Out Horizontal And Vertical Guides At 10 Percent Increments
The reason we turned the rulers on was so that we could easily add equally-spaced guides to our
document, which will then become our grid lines. Let's add vertical guides first. Click inside the ruler
along the left of the document, and with your mouse button held down, drag out the first guide. Use the
top ruler to place the guide at the 10% mark (release your mouse button to place the guide):
Click inside the left ruler and drag out a vertical guide to the 10% mark.
Do the same thing to add a guide at each 10% increment (20%, 30%, 40%, and so on), all the way up to
the 90% mark. Your document should now appear divided into 10 equally-spaced vertical columns:
The guides divide the document into 10 vertical columns.
Next, use the same steps to add horizontal guides. Click inside the top ruler and with your mouse
button held down, drag out a horizontal guide. Use the left ruler to place the guide at the 10% mark.
Continue dragging out horizontal guides at 10% increments (20%, 30%, 40%, just like before) all the
way down to the 90% mark. When you're finished, you should have the same number of horizontal and
vertical guides dividing the document up into a grid of squares:
The new blank layer appears in the Layers panel above the Background layer:
As it's name implies, the Single Row Marquee Tool will select a single horizontal row of pixels in the
document. To use the tool, we just need to click anywhere in the document and Photoshop will
automatically select the pixel we clicked on, plus every other pixel in that row from left to right. We're
going to use the tool to convert the horizontal grid lines into a series of selection outlines. First, move
your cursor directly over the top horizontal grid line (the one you placed at the 10% mark) and click.
You'll see a 1-pixel thick selection outline appear along the guide:
Click anywhere on the first horizontal guide to add a selection outline around it.
Hold down your Shift key and click on the next horizontal guide below it. This will add a second
selection outline to the document. Continue holding down your Shift key and clicking on all the
horizontal guides until a selection outline appears along each of them. You should see 9 selection
outline rows in total. Make sure you keep your Shift key held down as you click on each new guide,
otherwise you'll just replace the previous selection outline with the new one:
Hold Shift and click on each horizontal guide to add a selection outline around each one.
We need to do the same thing now with the vertical guides, which means we need to switch to the
Single Column Marquee Tool. Click on the Single Row Marquee Tool in the Tools panel (it will
appear where the Rectangular Marquee Tool icon appeared earlier) and hold your mouse button down
until the fly-out menu appears, then choose the Single Column Marquee Tool from the list:
Click and hold on the Single Row Marquee Tool's icon, then select the Single Column Marquee Tool.
We want our vertical selection outlines to be added to the horizontal selection outlines we already have,
so once again hold down your Shift key, then click on each of the vertical guides in the document until
they're all selected. When you're done, you should have selection outlines along every guide,
horizontally and vertically:
A grid of horizontal and vertical selection outlines.
Step 7: Fill The Selection With Black
Go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and choose Fill:
Grab the Move Tool from the top of the Tools panel.
Hold down your Shift key, then click with the Move Tool inside the photo's document window and
drag the photo into the grid's document window:
With the Move Tool selected, hold Shift and drag the photo into the grid document.
Release your mouse button, then release your Shift key, and the photo will appear centered inside the
grid's document window. You can close out of the photo's document at this point since we no longer
need it:
Holding the Shift key is what centers the photo inside the document when you drag it.
Notice that the grid appears in front of the photo. That's because, if we look in the Layers panel, we see
that the photo has been placed on its own layer under the Grid layer, just as we wanted:
Photoshop placed the photo on a new layer directly above the layer that was active, which is why we
Hold down your Shift key and continue clicking inside each of the squares around the outer edges of
the grid to add them all to the selection:
All of the outer edge squares now have selection outlines around them.
I'm going to add a few more squares to my selection as well by again holding down my Shift key and
clicking inside them to add them to the previously selected squares. To make it easier to see which
squares I've selected, I've colorized them in yellow (this isn't part of the effect, it's just to make it easier
to see the squares I've selected in the screenshot):
The new layer appears below, not above, the Grid layer.
Step 15: Fill The Selected Squares With White
Go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and once again choose the Fill command. This time,
when the Fill dialog box appears, change the Use option to White. Click OK when you're done:
Set the Use option to White.
Photoshop fills the selected squares with white. Deselect the squares by going up to the Select menu
and choosing Deselect, or simply press Ctrl+D (Win) / Command+D (Mac) to deselect them with the
keyboard shortcut:
Here's my effect so far after colorizing more squares with additional Hue/Saturation adjustment layers.
In case you want to use the same colors I did, for blue I set Hue to 200, Saturation to 30. For Green,
Hue was set to 120, Saturation 25. For Purple, Hue was 289, Saturation 35. And as I just mentioned, for
the black and white squares, Saturation was set to -100 by dragging the slider all the way to the left:
Step 22: Try A Different Color Mode For Some Of The Adjustment Layers
The one problem I have with my result so far is that it doesn't really look as bright and colorful as I was
hoping for. One way to change that is to change the blend mode for some of the adjustment layers. If
we look in the Layers panel, we can see all the adjustment layers I've used to colorize the squares.
There's five in total, including the one I used for the black and white effect:
Five adjustment layers were used for the effect.
To add more interest to the image, try changing the blend mode for some of the adjustment layers to
something other than Color. To do that, just click on the adjustment layer in the Layers panel to select
it, then change the blend mode at the top of the Layers panel. For example, I think the red color in my
image is looking a little dull, so I'll click on the top Hue/Saturation adjustment layer in the Layers panel
to select it (since it's the one I used to add red), then I'll change its blend mode from Color to Screen:
Selecting the red Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, then changing its blend mode to Screen.
The Screen blend mode makes things brighter but also tends to reduce color saturation, so to
compensate, with the red Hue/Saturation adjustment layer selected, I'll go back to the Adjustments
Panel and increase the Saturation value for red to 70 (for Photoshop CS3 and earlier users, click on the
adjustment layer's thumbnail in the Layers panel to re-open the Hue/Saturation dialog box to make any
changes, then click OK to close out of the dialog box):
Changing a blend mode may require adjustments to the color's saturation level.
Here's my image after changing the blend mode for red to Screen and increasing its color saturation.
Notice the red squares now look brighter:
Screen is a popular blend mode commonly used to quickly brighten images.
I'll do the same thing with the purple Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, first clicking on it to select it in
the Layers panel, then changing its blend mode to Screen and increasing its color saturation to 55 in the
Adjustments Panel (or dialog box in CS3 and earlier). Other blend modes that can give you good
results include Multiply (for a darker color), as well as Overlay which will give you a higher contrast
effect but may also change the appearance of the color itself. Here's my effect now with the red and
purple squares set to the Screen blend mode:
Different blend modes will give you different effects. Screen, Multiply and Overlay are good ones to
try.
Click OK to close out of the Layer Style dialog box, and we're done! Here is my final color grid effect:
The final result.
And there we have it!