Easier done in Illustrator or something else due to the corners of the coupon, but in general, you create a square brush and set the spacing in the brushes palette. Set the roundness to about 50% and play with the spacing, depending on the size of the brush.
Look at most coupons and you will see that the dashed lines defining the box are evenly spaced, and the corners are consistent.
These are almost always created with a page-layout program like QuarkXPress, InDesign or Creator’s MultiAd software.
This can be done in Photoshop, but isn’t the best solution.
If you have no alternative but to use Photoshop, choose a brush and play with the spacing under "Brush Tip Shape" in the big Brushes Palette. If you want anything other than round dots making up your dashed lines, you probably also will want to tweak the Angle Jitter setting under Shape Dynamics. "Direction" will cause the orientation of the brushtip shape to follow the direction of the line you’rre drawing or the path you’re stroking.
Still, no matter how much tweaking you do, you may not find these coupon dashes as clean and precise as the ones you’re used to seeing. That’s why the pros do it in a page-layout app.
Yeah, I even done it in MSPUB to avoid having to tweak it in PS. Then if necessary, I can bring in my coupon or whatever into PS and do what I want from there.
Why can’t you just adjust the spacing of a custom "rectangular dash" brush to about 125% and then just stroke the path of the coupon shape? You might have to tweak the percentage a bit to ensure evenness at the beginning and end, but it does the job adequately and easily within PS.
OW, you can – that’s kind of what I was suggesting. And actually, setting the roundness to 50% makes it look like a dash. The problem is, the corners – most coupons have right angles. You have to be very deliberate to create them.
