How to get exact position of a ruler guide in Photoshop?

Question

There is a horizontal ruler guide set somewhere in the middle of an existing Photoshop CS5 document. How to get its exact position (number of pixels from the top) so I can create another guide 100px away from it?

Answer 1

I only have the CS4 version, but in it the way I would try to determine this would be to use the cursor X & Y position displayed in the INFO tab of the Info window (F8). This displays the current location of the mouse cursor measure relative to the active document's top-left corner. All you should need to do is move the mouse cursor so it's on top of the ruler guide and look at the X or Y value displayed. Zooming in on the image can make positioning the cursor precisely easier, so can enabling the Precise option in Cursor Preferences (not shown in screenshot below).

Alternatively, you may be able to read the position off the regular horizontal or vertical ruler that can be made to display (Ctrl-R or Cmd-R) on the edges of an image's window.

Below you can see below there's a ruler guide (the light blue vertical line) with the mouse cursor directly on top of it. As you can the see, "950" is what is being displayed displayed for the X coordinate in the INFO pane of the floating Info window over on the right -- which is exactly the position used when it was created for use in the this example.

Answer 2

Make sure the Info panel is visible, then start moving the old guide (Ctrl and drag).

You should see something like this:

• The ΔX: and ΔY: fields (upper right) will show the offset from the original position.

• The X: and Y: fields (lower left) will show the absolute position.

Drag back until the offset is zero, which means the guide is in its original position, then read the absolute position off of the corresponding X: or Y: field. If you wish to read the position in pixels you will need to set that measurement section of the Info panel to pixels, which is done by clicking the + symbol at the left side. Once you have read the position you can press Esc to cancel the move, which will make sure that you don't accidentally move the guide by a pixel or two as you release.

By the way you may find use in the GuideGuide plugin.

Answer 3

In the menu choose "View > New Guide...", this will ask you for Horizontal or Vertical Orientation of the line you will make. Position being the location of the line on the paper (4th geometrical quadrant)