Pull out guides to the boundaries of the square.
Turn on "Snap to Guides".
Draw the circle with origin at the top left of the square.
Thanks for that. But I’ve tried doing as you suggest and can’t seem to make it work.
Maybe I’m expecting too much – like, I would have thought that a ‘snap-to’ function would be like a magnet and automatically pull the item towards the guides or boundaries with a definite, visible ‘movement’?
But I can’t see it happening, even if I zoom in real close with Ctrl\Alt\+. (And I’ve either activated and placed the guides, or used ‘Document Boundaries’ from the View menu).
If I release the circle (of marching ants)when it gets close to the guides or edge of the box (say 1mm or 2mm away), I would have thought it’d ‘snap’ the rest of the way. But no.
I must be doing something majorly wrong 🙁
I see now you mentioned marching ants.
Don’t use a selection use a custom shape with the "Paths" option.
Thanks again. Sorry, but what you’re telling me is beyond my meager PShop abilities.
Guess I’ll just have to stick to dragging a fixed size elipse into the square and eyeball it for accuracy of location.
Cheers 🙂
If you said what you are trying to get as an end product, how you want to use the circle-in-a-square, it would be possible to help more.
PortyPorty,
it’s possible like this, here for 72ppi:
1. Define new doc by pixels
p = (72/25.4mm)*100mm = 283.46
2. Use nearest odd number: px=py=283
3. View/Snapto/Document bounds
4. Draw any (smaller) ellipse
5. Path select (black arrow), shows 4 points
6. Edit/Free transform path
7. Drag top point to top border, left to
left, an so on.
The points will snap to the borders
8. Apply transform
9. Workpath/Make selection
10.e.g. Feather 0, No anti-aliasing
11.Edit/Stroke 1px
12.Select/Deselect
This delivers a circle with 1 px stroke
which is almost symmetric. Long ago it
was discussed here that the circle isn’t
perfectly symmetric. This is a minor bug
which doesn’t hurt for practical appli-
cations.
Best regards –Gernot Hoffmann
John,
my test was done by PhS7. The simple
method didn’t work, therefore the free
transform.
In CS2 it is as you say. But you don’t
need guides – just Snap To Borders.
Your circle is (sorry) not accurate.
IMO it’s necessary to define width and
height by the same odd number of pixels.
The circle is then perfectly symmetric
(in CS2) and accurately centered.
Best regards –Gernot Hoffmann
Hi PortyPorty,
I have a small script which will place a selection on any size or shape of image that will touch all four sides.
You can run the script from an action and allocate a function key to instantly place the selection.
If you want to give it a try, let me know and I’ll email you a copy. You can find my email address on my homepage.
<
http://www.georgedingwall.co.uk/>
Bye for now.
Your circle is (sorry) not accurate.
True. I was just illustrating a principle.
Not knowing the ultimate purpose of PortyPorty I did not go further.
CS2 has smart guides, did you turn it on?
No, just Snap to guides.
Gernot’s method of fixed odd pixels sizes is the best.
On-screen rendering can give a misleading impression.
Many thanks to all who’ve responded. I’ll expand a little on what I was trying to do, in case it affects someone’s answer.
I frequently create CD labels and print the discs in my Canon MP830.
I’ve found that a good base label, one which lets me see how much space is available for text and other graphics, is one with two rings. The outer ring is at the extreme outer edge of the disc label and the inner ring is at the inner limits of the printable surface. With the discs I use, the inner, unprintable central hub is 22mm wide. The rings are formed by a stroke, 6px wide. The outer disc diameter is 119mm.
I begin with a new image 22mm x 22mm, 300 dpi with a white BG. (I know I said 100mm but I was trying to discover the principle)The color pallette at left has a white BG and an FG color of my intended stroke, in this case,mid-blue.
Then, into that square image I’ve been dropping a circle (using the ellipse tool)with a fixed size of 22mm x 22mm. It’s this circle that I’ve trying to locate accurately, instead of by eye.
Then I stroke the circle, 6px wide and that finishes the inner circle.
The next move is to increase the canvas size to 119mm x 119mm. Then I add the second circle, fixed size 119mm x 119mm and stroke that.
The finished result is a 119mm square image containing an outer blue ring and an inner blue ring. From there I go on and add gradient fill, buttons, boxes, text etc.
Thanks again to you all for your comments 🙂
Hi PortyPorty,
Thanks for the additional info.
I’ve modified my script a little to do what you want. I’ve emailed you a copy direct as per your off group email.
It creates a new document that is 119mm square at 300 dpi.
It then adds the outer and inner stroked circles at 6 pixels and uses a blue colour for the stroke.
You need to put the script in your Photoshop scripts folder. On my machine this is the required location. The version of Photoshop in the path should be amended to show the version you use.
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Presets\Scripts
I don’t recall if you said which version of Photoshop you use, but this script works on CS1, CS2 and CS3. I don’t have PS7 on my machine so can’t tell you if it will work with that version.
All you need to do to run the script is to choose
File/Scripts/CDLabel from the list of available scripts. You can also run this script from an action. You could then allocate a function key to speed up the process a little.
Hope this helps.
