REPEATING OBJECTS IN A CIRCLE QUICKLY
Ever need to make a guage? A clock? You'll need multiple repeating tick marks arranged in a circle. Here's the fastest way I've discovered to do this. And it all comes down to a little known Photoshop keyboard shortcut...

Start with 2 guides (a horizontal guide and a vertical guide) that form a crosshair in the center of your canvas.

 

Next, make a new layer, then choose the Elliptical Marquee tool, and create a circle coming out from the center of the crosshairs.

Use OPTION-SHIFT (PC: ALT-SHIFT) to make a perfect circle that comes out from center.

Once you have a circular selection, choose the Edit menu/Stroke, and give it a stroke of a few pixels.

Now create a new layer, then choose the Rectangular Marquee tool, and make a small thin rectangle at the top of the circle like this.

Fill this with black. This is the first tick mark.

Now we're going to rotate this tick mark, but first we have to move its center point.

Choose Edit menu/Transform/Rotate, and zoom in on your tick mark but you should also still see the guides that form your crosshair.

Here's the center point.

Drag this center point down to where the crosshairs meet.

Note my tick mark doesn't really go all the way from the circle to the crosshairs, I just sliced the image so you could clearly see both.

Holding the Shift key down so it snaps into place, rotate the tick mark.

Since you moved the tick mark's center point to the crosshairs, the tick mark accurately rotates around that new center point.

Here's the little known Photoshop shortcut combination which will give you all your tickmarks equally spaced and perfectly rotated.

Once you've rotated an object, you can rotate it again with COMMAND-SHIFT-T (PC: CONTROL-SHIFT-T). But that won't give you a copy of the mark.

To copy AND rotate at the same time, do a COMMAND-OPTION-SHIFT-T (PC: CONTROL-ALT-SHIFT-T) over and over until you fill the circle with tickmarks.

You'll end up with a LOT of layers this way, so merge them all when you're done.

Example of an element created using this technique.

The flower in the image at left was made by creating one petal, then applyinig this technique to repeat and duplicate that petal.

To break things up a bit, I went into several of the layers and lengthened and shortened some of them. Then I merged all the petals into 1 layer.

I then duplicated the layer, and offset the layer from the duplicate a bit to further break up the perfect symmetry.
One last point. It's important that you create this larger or at a higher resolution than you really want to end up with, because anytime you rotate something, that something deteriorates a little bit. Doing it at a larger size or resolution and later scaling it down will help keep your rotated objects clean.

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