Guides are brilliant for positioning images into place symmetrically. When it is set up, guidelines appear when it looks like you are trying to line one image with another and it gives you every angle or every option available to you to bring the image perfectly in line with another. The guidelines actually snap into place and really help aligning images, as well as shapes and even slices.

Pro’s tip: When creating a new Guide, ensure that you keep your values within plus or minus 1000 inches. When choosing colours for guides, make sure you choose different colours for your manual guide and your smart guides. Things will start getting messy if there are guidelines all over your image!

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01 Firstly you need to define the settings that you want for your particular project. This can be done in the preferences section. Go to Edit > Preferences > Guides, Grid and Slices.

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02 The first and second sections will give you the preferences for guides. You can change the colour and style of the guides. The options for styles are lines and dashed lines. You can then also dictate the colour of the smart guides.

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03 Once preferences are set, you then go to View > Show > Guides. The shortcut for this is CTRL +; (semi colon) At this point you can also create a new guide and dictate the size and orientation. This can be done in “New Guide”. The other options (Lock and clear Guides) are self explanatory. You can also activate Smart guides and have them snap into place in View > Show > Smart guides and View >Snap to > Guides. 

In Photoshop:
Edit > Preferences > Guides, Grid and Slices 

In Photoshop Elements:
Photoshop Elements 5.0 can display existing guidelines in a Photoshop document but it is not possible to create new guides in the program.