When you use a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet, you replace the bulky clumsiness of a mouse with the familiar pen-like shape of a stylus, along with optional input devices that mimic real-world artist's tools. Although you can use these tablets as full-time substitutes for mice and trackballs, you'll find their greatest advantages when you work in a tablet-aware application such as Adobe Photoshop.
The Hardware Itself
- Drawing tablets attach to your computer through a USB port. Once you load their driver software and set them up, they enable you to use a stylus to draw, point, retouch and write on a plastic tablet that you set on your lap. These devices come in numerous sizes, with the most popular roughly equal in dimensions to the footprint of a 14-inch laptop computer. Tablets can offer ergonomic advantages over other pointing devices, both for the relaxed physical position they promote and the unstressed hand gestures they use.
Tablets in Photoshop
- Adobe Photoshop offers pressure-sensitive features that become available only when you attach and configure a drawing tablet on your computer. These features include pressure-sensitive painting that mimics the behavior of analog tools, stylus-mounted erasing tools that trigger Photoshop's eraser modes, detection of and response to stylus tilt, and dynamic brush elements that change as you work. Photoshop automatically enables these options when you launch the application with a tablet attached and configured for use.
The Brushes Panel
- Photoshop's tablet-enabled Brush features rank among the program's broadest support for tablet users. To access and configure them, open the Brush panel and select a brush preset. If you're using a tablet, you'll see pen control options you can set to specify how many brush elements vary as you paint and how much they vary. The most important of these options fall within the categories of size, angle and roundness jitter, which feature percentage settings from zero through 100 percent. At the low end of the scale, no variance occurs; at the high end, you'll see maximum variance. You can apply these options to pen pressure, tilt, stylus-mounted controls and other painting options.
The Options Bar
- The Photoshop Options Bar includes options for tablet users that other users never see. These enable pressure-sensitive controls for use in all painting tools, including the Brush, Pencil and Eraser. Click on the "Tablet Pressure Controls Size" button and the application increases brush tip size in relation to stylus pressure. Activate the "Table Pressure Controls Opacity" button to gain pressure-sensitive control of the transparency of your paint strokes. These settings override your current brush size and opacity only while you're painting, and only in response to pressure. They don't change the brush diameter and opacity level selected in the Options Bar or Layers panel.
