Chapter twenty. Generating Data-Driven Graphics

MANY PEOPLE USE PHOTOSHOP TO PROCESS one document at a time. When creating groups of files that share common elements, such as a stack of baseball cards, the usual approach is to design a document, make copies of it, and manually edit the text information and images for each player. With Photoshop CS2, there’s a more automatic way to generate groups of documents that use the same layout but have different images and text. That way involves variables, placeholders in a file that maintain position but contain contents that can be swapped out automatically by Photoshop from a defined set of images or text. Think of it as similar to a mail merge between a mailing list and a word processor, but more visually interesting.

Data-driven graphics require a template, variables, and a data set. You design a template in Photoshop using layers as variables that can contain text or graphics and define the names of the variables. In an external file, you set up a data set of text and graphics that uses names that correspond to the variables. Photoshop takes the template document and makes copies of it, and in each copy Photoshop inserts a different instance of the data to replace each variable in the document. In the end, you get a complete set of documents filled in with unique combinations of text and graphic data.