Learning to use a Wacom ?

[Raymond Lin]

What is the best way to learn how to use one of these?

I have a Wacom Intuso 5 Medium for 5 months now and only used it sparingly as i guess I am used to the mouse. However, since I have it, as I bought it for some specific brush work in PS, I might as well learn how to use it in general workflow. But my problem seem to be the most basic one.

With a mouse, when I move the cursor to one end of the screen and if I am out of mousemat space, I simply lift up my mouse and move it to the centre and move the mouse but the cursor doesn't move to the centre of the screen.

I keep doing it with the pen...or something similar when moving the cursor, forgetting that the tablet is a reflection of the screen so that moving around is anti productive.

Is this something you get used to? and do you eventually know where to move quickly and accurately?

 

[GTRacer]

You eventually get used to it, what I did was play a few games like minesweeper/solitaire so that I could get used to the way the position of the pen is directly mapped onto the screen.

 

[Raymond Lin]

The biggest challenge is the accuracy of the click.

With the mouse once you are over a certain pixel, you are there as long as you don't move the mouse, which is easy as it is on the desk, still and stationary.

With the pen I am holding it and I almost feel like I am shooting a gun or arrow at a target and need to hold my breath before clicking the pen/tapping the tablet to make that click command. Breath and I will move the cursor.

How do you overcome that?

 

[GTRacer]

Zoom in more if you require more precision, especially if you're using a smaller tablet with a larger screen since you'll have more pixels mapped onto the working area of the tablet, e.g you have the medium tablet, so let's say at 100% zoom in LR a 1cm movement on the tablet = 20 pixels on screen. To overcome that you would need to buy a bigger tablet, or simply zoom in a bit more so that the ratio between pixels of the document : physical area of the tablet is lower than before. You use a 27" iMac so the tablet is having to map 2560x1440 onto roughly an A5 area, which I can imagine is quite imprecise at magnifications under 150%. I use an A4 Intuos 3 (which would be the large these days), I still zoom in since it always produces smoother strokes, it's a tip I picked up from a few illustrators over on deviantart.