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» Photoshop variables, useable for a lot of things!

Do you know about Photoshop variables? If not then I suggset that you take a look in the tutorials section for a tutorial about it to learn it. If you have, then read along (if you haven’t, read along too to learn a bit about them).

So as you may or may not know there is a command inside of Photoshop (under the image menu) that’s called variables. These little cool guys lets us set up a layer or a photo or text to be edited and replaced for a certain graphic or some text that we define in another file (excel file for example). We can also define whether a layer should be visible or not. All this we set up through the define part in the variables under the image menu. I’m not going to talk more about how to do it so if you don’t know, read the tutorial about that.

Variables are really useful however – something which I’ve found out recently while making price signs for the place where I work. Now before you have the time to say anything, I know that InDesign might be easier to do it in but that isn’t the option as we only have PS. Their old way has been doing this with Powerpoint because that’s what they’ve known. I felt it was waay to tedious to do and took a lot longer than it needed so I decided and took it upon myself to make a new system. While thinking about it I somehow got to think about variables. How much simpler wouldn’t it be if they just needed to go to an excel file and update the price, specs etc. and then have it ready to print and go? Well a whole lot!

So from now on the new system is really really simple. We have an excel file with the variables set up where you just simply and easily can add cameras and edit the existing (or remove). Once that is done they just save it out as a tabbed text file and import as a dataset in Photoshop. Then just export all of these out, make a contact sheet from it and print it out! It takes really just a fraction of the time it used to with…yeah, powerpoint.

Why am I writing up all this? Well it is simple. I’m asking you and telling you to get creative with some features in Photoshop to be able to use it in more ways than you’d think. The people doing the price tags at that place are no Photoshop people, in fact as of now they kinda fear Photoshop. Doing it this way it doesn’t need to be hard and you hardly touch Photoshop much at all!

A lot of Photoshop features are excacly like this. You can make it simple and use it in creative ways for purposes that may or may not have been thought off. Now for the disclaimer. I would probably have done this in InDesign if we had it.

Tags: Photoshop News, Variables |  Print Post