Make a Dotted Line in Photoshop

Making a dotted line in Illustrator is easy—you just change it in the stroke palette. Photoshop, on the other hand, is a bit trickier. There is more than one way, but I want to show you how to quickly make a dotted line in Photoshop. Although, you can create lines manually by repeating the dots. But, Adobe Photoshop makes it quite easier to craft curved or straight dotted line through the formulated procedure.

If you've ever made a Photoshop mock-up of a website before getting your hands dirty with code, this little trick may come in handy. The brush tool has been used to craft a line which is dotted afterward. Consequently, you can create continuous spaces between the lines and craft a perfectly straight line as well. It is a very simple tutorial which takes a few steps and adjustments to yield the results.

1. Open Your Brushes Palette

Yep, you are going to be using a brush for this quick trick. Open your brushes palette by going to Window > Brushes, or hit F5 on your keyboard. Once open, click on “Brush Tip Shape” within the Brushes palette and select a very small brush like 1-5px.

2. Uncheck Shape Dynamics and Smoothing

You can adjust each and every aspect properly and exactly to achieve a perfect dotted line according to your own needs and desires.

3. Adjust the “Spacing” to create the dots

This part is up to you and depends on your desired effect. Pay no attention to the waves in the preview. It's the default preview. All you need to be worried about here is the amount of space between the dots. The spacing slider can be used to adjust the spacing in between the lines.

4. Choose your brush color

If you haven't already, choose the brush tool in the tools palette, or hit B on the keyboard. Also, make sure you select a color for your brush, which would be the foreground color. ( I chose black. )

5. Hold Shift and Drag

With the brush tool, hold shift, drag and bam, perfect dotted line!

A perfectly-centered straight line will be achieved through this procedure.