: How to make a graduated line on photoshop? (CS6) What's the easiest way to build a graduated line (eg. the one on a ruller)? (I found this thread talking about it, but I did not manage to

@Alves566

(As mayersdesign has mentioned this would be much easier in Illustrator... but if Photoshop is all you have – it can still be done, and in vector format as well...)

If you need the gradations to be accurate (as in lines which are precisely a certain number of pixels apart) then I would use the Line Tool:



Holding Shift, click and drag to draw a line, then press Ctrl+T, go to the top of the UI and line it up to an easy whole number like 100px:



And now some math: For the sake of simplicity say I want a rule which is 2000px in length and which has a line every 25px... 2000/25 = 80 sections, so I want 81 lines in total (one line sits at the zero point).

So I duplicate my line by having its layer active in the Layers Panel and pressing Ctrl+J. I would do this 10 times to give me 11 lines, then I would select the top 10 lines and Ctrl+J 7 more times to give me 81 lines:



Now I will highlight my 81st (last) line in the layers panel and using the Move Tool (V key) while holding down the Shift key, drag it exactly 2000px to the right. Press Ctrl+T again and at the top of the UI again make sure it sits at exactly the 2,000px position.

Then select all layers and go to 'Distribute horizontal centers':



And that gives us this result, with a line precisely every 25px:



If you want to get fancy, you can select all of your layers and then use the Direct Selection Tool (A key: white arrow) to alter the line lengths at the ¼ and ½ points to come up with this look:

Vote Up Vote Down

@Cooney243

Sometimes, barbaric ways are the fastest and easiest.
My awful method would be to use the Text tool and to repeat Pipe symbol |

Vote Up Vote Down

@Ogunnowo857

Probably the most flexible way to do it would be to use the type tool.

You can do it using many other methods, but if you use the type tool and just copy&pase the character:| multiple times, you can easily adjust the spacing, width, height and color from the Window > Character panel.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Courtney577

The tutorial you tried to follow was for InDesign, but here's one way to do it in Photoshop:


Open a document with (say) 5x5 pixels
Zoom in and select a row on the left and colour them black
Hit "edit" > "define pattern" and call it (say) "5x5 Bar" (you can experiment with different amounts of white space, and different thickness lines)
Select an area in a new document and hit "edit" > "fill" > select you pattern and hit ok.


PS - I imagine this is a LOT easier and has more options in Illustrator by the way.

Vote Up Vote Down