Table Styles in Photoshop

Wow, This is a useless, uncreative and boring tut. Normally I love your tutorials because they are always give me inspiration and are helpful. The finished piece is disgusting to look at and I dont know when I would need this. Microsoft Word can make prettier tables. But there is no such thing as a pretty table.

Also, this guys voice is annoying!

Hey John, sorry it’s not relative to you.

However, if you ever had the opportunity of creating a table in Ps from scratch (multiple boxes, multiple type Layers and so fourth) it’s a hugh chore to have to keep them aligned and organized. (This alone would involve a lot of tweaking and nudging).

As demoed:
- A simple shape, intersected by lines: Subtract from Shape (no need for multple boxes/shapes)
- Type in a Path auto detects the disected areas (no need for nudging/alignment)
- Apply Blending Style to the Shape (no need to style individual areas).

I know it’s not a fancy end result, but the process certainly makes it easier.

As for my voice, well, can’t do much about that…

Cheers

Have a great day

Hey, Thank you for responding. I now understand much greater!! Good response and thanks again!

So why would you need to go through all that hassle when InDesign can do that for you so much faster?

To Darrell Heath: Excellent tutorial. Having created tables from scratch, I wish I had known about this before now. While I can certainly create tables in InDesign, Word, and Excel, it is nice to know a better way in Photoshop.

To John Henderson: Is it really necessary to be so rude?

Thanks for such nice tip , it will help me a lot ….

Great tutorial! I’ve been looking for one on tables a looong time now and gave up trying to create tables in ps, i guess i’ll be able to do it now, thanks!

I do not have InDesign or anything else and rely only on Photoshop CS4. Thanks for showing multiple tools and making life easier. I can think of so many other uses for the knowledge I just gained. Thank you.

To John Henderson: people of substance judge others by their actions and character, not by things that cannot be changed.

Thnks for taking time for making a tut.
very interesting for those of us who don’t know a thing about ps

Great Tut. Thanks for the help!

Thanks for sharing, Darrell.

If I have to resize the table (by moving the lines around and redistributing them) after the table is full of text, is there a way to get that text to stay inside their newly positioned divisions?

Thanks!

Thanks everyone for the feedback.

Good question Mike.

I just did a little test and to avoid any/too much extra work or risking a disaster in the change. The best I could think of is this.

- Select main Shape (Layer), Command/Ctrl + T to transform and resize as desired.
- Add New (Subtract) lines to the Shape (if needed) and Align Lines accordingly to the originals.
- Select the type Layer in the Layers Panel. Activate the Path Selection Tool and then on the options Bar enable Show Bounding Box. You should get transform handlers JUST for the Type Path. So that when transformed, the type (attributes) is not affected.

Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a way to mult-select Type Paths at once.

Hope this helps
h

Thanks for this. Couple of questions.

When aligning, the far left, right, top and bottom areas don’t conform to boxes in middle, leaving perimeter boxes in different proportions. Any way to correct?

When I try to add text, photoshop is not recognizing the table cells. I don’t get the type on path symbol. Any ideas.

Thanks so much.

Hey Greg

To adjust for accurate placements, add any combination of Character Baseline Shift or Paragraph Indent options to the mix.

As for add text into a section, make sure the Path Shape is selected.
So the routine is:
– select the Path Shape
– activate the Type Tool
– hover inside a divided section of the Shape Path, then click to add separate type Layer (it will confine to that area)

Then repeat.

Thanks for your quick response. The text is working now that I’m selecting the path first (not just the layer with the path). The only issue remaining is the table boxes being unequal on left, right top and bottom. Even in your tutorial, the right-hand column appears slightly narrower than the rest.

Thanks

Btw – you can also select the Shape Vector Path thumbnail on the Layer to select the ‘whole’ shape.

As for the unequal dividers, use the Path Selection Tool to select just a single one and use the arrow keys to ‘nudge’.

Or use the Path Selection Tool + Shift key, to select multple dividers and then use the Options Bar Alignment/Distribute icon commands to refine.

h

my version does not have a line tool. So what do I do?

Hey bunky
Press and hold (for a second or two) the Rectangular Shape Tool on the toolbar. You should see a sub-set of Vect tools appear. The Line Tool will be among them.

h

Is there any website that still has available extensive “help/tips/tutorials/ information/etc relative to CS2. Seems everywhere I look, it’s all CS3 or CS4?

Very helpful, thank you. The download version however only shows the last ten seconds…at least when I tried it.

this is great, i am a total photshop virgin and useless at computer stuff. I have created my base table and put text in the columns but have a few questions:
1. How can I level off lines – A couple of my vertical lines continue over the top horizontal line in to the title box. How can I edit this so it does not look unsightly when priniting?
2. My table is going to be for images with a small amount of text under each image. I would like to keep everything neat and aligned. How do I do this with both the text and the images and how do I put the images into the table easily and accurately?

Thank you again so much for this tutorial I was dreading how I would work this out and your tutorial has saved me hours!

Many thanks,
Verity

Hey barrow, essentially a little preplanning will be involved.

In your case you will most likely need a larger initial rectangle shape, with larger rows/wider columns for the images.

To level off lines as you draw them, best option(s) would be to:
– Enable View > Snap and drag horizontal/vertical guides to each of the four sides of the rectangle.
- Enable View > Show Grid, and combined with the above Snap enabled, have your lines ’snap’ from a matching grid edge of the rectangle. (hope that one made sense)

h

Thanks for showing us clueless people how to do this. It saves us struggling through PS to figure out how to do it.

Hi Darrell,

Thanks for the great tutorial. I get the gist of the tutorial, but I was trying to add text to each column. It does not let me type text in each individual column as easily as shown in the video.

Perhaps it’s the version of Photoshop I’m using: CS.

Hi JY, as far as I remember, type on/in a path was introduced in CS so I believe it should be accessible to you.

The thing to remember, is to pay close attention to the ‘cursor’ change when you hover close to (for type on a path) or inside (for type in a path) a vector shape or path.

h