Lessons

Lesson Info

Wacom Tablet Setup

In order to use national media brushes where it looks like a real brush where when you press harder the bristles might spread out look different in order to really take full advantage of that you really need to have a graphics tablet here I have a wacom tablet why come as the company that's been doing this for so long and therefore find it so much that it's the only bright I consider there used to be a bunch of other brands like back in I don't know ten, fifteen years ago and uh that used to be suma graphics and a bunch of others but most of those companies that have gone away or you it's really hard to find any tablet that they make what's nice about wacom is they have a pen that has no battery in it and it can communicate with this and they're just create some great products uh this one is there into us five touch it's called and this is a small size they make a medium in a large as well in this particular one is the wireless version now the tablet itself, if I remember correctly is ...

actually the same between the wireless in the courted all you do is there's a panel on the back that comes off in back here is a wireless module that you add to this and there's a little bitty thing that comes out here this is something that is just a usb receiver that plugs into a usb port. Uh it's just got a storage thing right there, but the u s the transmitter is sitting right in here and the battery is sitting here is well and so pretty much you take the normal tablet, which would usually have a cord coming out of it. You put the battery in, you put this little dude in and stop that your computer and it's just become the wireless version so that's like an extra sensory you can get uh for this, but you don't have to have the wireless thing, and if I have the wireless one, then there's an on off switch so I don't waste my battery all right, so here's her tablet minds wireless you might have a court instead, but this is a great investment to use when it comes to any kind of national media brushes, but I find that this isn't just great for natural media brushes it's great for speeding you up in photo shop overall in not only in front of shop, but in just about any other program you ever used. Uh, you'll either love or hate these and what I find this most people that hate them can't kept their mouse out in never completely adapted to it, so it takes an adjustment period of about a week, tio to really get used to this so what I suggest you do is disconnect your mouse and put it in a drawer in a different room so you cannot get to it and then commit to using this for a full week and at the end of the week then make a decision of was it for me or not and you'll find that if you truly commit to it you spend enough time with it I find that the vast majority people that try amount would really like him uh so let's take a look at how I set this up in just what it can do and how we can get photoshopped to have different control with it now you can either set it up to the side of your computer right in front if you doom or keyboard work than you do painting work side if you do more painting work in the keyboard is just a little accessory than upfront here the problem with being upfront is if you go up here a type and you have this here there are buttons over here on the side of my arm can hit him I can always pop it out of the way though when I don't want to do that but if you're going to end up doing a lot of painting, having your stylists here and then just reaching up to get to like shortcuts and quick typing could be convenient so with this I'm gonna go to the apple menu here and choose system preferences in in my preferences doubt the very bottom is the welcome tablet there would be something similar to this if I was working on windows I don't have a windows machine though so I don't know exactly what it looks like but it should look pretty darn similar so let me show you how I set this up and how you can make it just speed you up in general so at the very top it just tells you what tablet you have you can actually have more than one and more the one would appear in here and I have a battery gauge their sins have the wireless one that's what the green part is tells me of batteries full and then below that it shows you various tools that you have and if I were to go and get a different tool like they have one shape looking an airbrush and I put it near the tablet it would suddenly show up and in this case if I didn't have this near there it wouldn't be in there and if I put it close to the tablet will recognize it and show up so I can either control the functions which means the buttons and controls on here or I can control what's called the touch because I can actually touch this to use it as well as using the pen uh or I can do the settings for the pen itself will look at all three real quick just so you know, this particular tablet though is called the into us five touch if you have a tablet doesn't have the word touching the name, then the thing I do with my finger, you won't be able to dio he'd have to get the touch version all right? So with our pen if you're not used to using a pen, it can be a bit unnatural to get just used to in general because if you use a normal pen you're used to just floating above the surface and you no touch a sheet of paper and you can write on it it's the same thing here, but you have to interact with your computer and there's a certain distance above the tablet you khun b and you can move around and still see your mouth moving and you get close to the tablet you're still moving around and then when you actually touch this little thing down here is telling me if I'm touching or not the current pressure there's a certain training period tto learn how hard you have to push before this happens, and what I personally find is that if you just hold the pen and you're hovering where your hand is not touching the surface, I find it harder to learn if I keep part of my hand on the surface, and then I find him a little bit more precise with knowing how far away I am from the surface because my hands touching it, I can feel it, whereas if I'm floating with my hand above, then I just seem to abruptly hit. So you know, I could do that. If you find that you want a different kind of field, just adjust the tip feel if I go to firm it's going to be harder for me to hit the the surface, if I go soft he's going to pick it up much more readily and very slight touch is going to make a big difference, so just you can adjust that you can set up with the buttons do on the side here, and I do usually have it set up this white right click and doubleclick because it's hard to tap twice in exactly the same place or near the same place instead, it's easier to just reach up and hit the double click button and then for a right click. I can press the bottom button, but the problem with this is I find the action of pressing the button makes me move the pen, and so if I'm doing something where it's very precise, the thing I'm trying to click on. When I hit this my pen moved a little bit in the process and I might miss what I did or might do it slightly different than I want so here's something you might not be aware of ifyou're a tablet owner down the bottom there's a button called options I'm gonna click on in there is a choice called hover click versus click and tap and I think the default is hover click which means you can press these buttons when you're not touching the tablet you could be floating above it and hitting that button is going to do a double click or right click I prefer to how it's set to click and tap what click and tap means is I press and hold one of these and then only when I tap the tablet does it actually do it and so that way for ana right click I just hold this down and then I tapped the tablet in that way I find it could be more precise where when I'm pushing these I'm not accidentally moving it so I personally like that particular setting I don't know if you will or not but I find it it helped me if you want to change the orientation of this because you're left handed and you need to use your other hand for accessing the buttons you just flip around and right here is where you're just telling it what side of the buttons on uh that kind of stuff I'm going teo click okay there then you haven't a racer on the opposite end you could flip it over and use the eraser I just find I rarely do just because the process of flipping over usually takes more time than the process of hitting whatever short cut it is to get to the tool I want but if you wanted to you could go to the eraser and have a different feel to it maybe you just want a different sensitivity when you head over to the other side but I rarely flip my pen over mapping means how should this shape that I'm moving my mouse on relate to my screen and you can set up various things the main thing is if you use the tablet for a week and at the end of that week you still don't like it one of the choices you have the main choice that makes us different than a mouse is this right here represents my screen so if I move the pen to the upper left corner it moves my mouse the upper left corner of my screen move this to the middle and it moves it to the middle of my screen where's with a mouse you're used to this constant thing where you move your mouse to the middle of your mouse pad on you it just is wherever your mouse already is and moving around if you find that you just can't get used to having to go to the upper left of this, to go to the upper left of your screen, then you can change the setting from penn mode to mouse mode, and with mouse mode, it's not going to bring me to the upper left of my screen when I go to the upper left of the tablet instead is going to act like a mouse, where whenever I put my pen down, it's just going to think my mouse's wherever it was before, but don't set it to that at the beginning, otherwise you're never going to really get to be really fast zooming around your screen, you'll be acting like you're used the mouse, but now, let's talk about how we can set up the various other areas that tablet and how it can really speed you up. There's an area here called touch in first, something to get rid of some settings I already have, because you won't have these. All right? It'll look like this when you first get in there. This is where you can control the touch that used on this, and I'm not going to cover every little setting, I just want to cover how it makes me much faster and photo shop, so you have some standard gestures, which, if you just hover over these. There will be a little animation over here to tell you what it means. Like what kind of action you have to use with your fingers. The main thing with this is if there's anything that it does that annoys you like rotating and you hate that it can rotate, we'll just turn off the check box next to rotate and it won't pick up that idea anymore. The main thing I want to show you, though here is that there's a section called my gestures and I really like it. Uh with my gestures, there is this thing about using four fingers, uh, and being able to do something when I take four fingers on my hand and just touch this and swipe up or swipe down and with default settings, it takes you to I think, mission control or ah, something of some mac operating system features, which I don't like. What I do is when I'm in photo shop and I want to go grab another picture, I goto one of two places I either go to bridge or I goto light room. Those are my two places, its bridge of somebody else gave me the picture like tomorrow when I'm working on the image ambulance images, their images I'm gonna work on for one day and I'm never going to see again but if it's my images I have been light room and I want to be able to go there so what I end up doing here is I'll come in in a forefinger swipe up I have it in here to open or run a program and what I'll do is you can hit the brows button I have this set so you know do a four finger up motion I have it come and find adobe bridge so I just grabbed the app choose that click okay? And then I haven't if I swiped downward that it also runs a program in that program is light room there they are remembers it from before when I last searched for it but light room click okay and when I get photoshopped will make sure it works. The other thing is you can have things specific for different programs so when I'm in bridge if I want to get back to photo shop I have it so I swiped four fingers down and what that means is when I'm in photo shop to get to bridge four fingers out when I'm in bridge get photoshopped four fingers down so I just think hey bridges up here and I'm swiping up and down to get to it I also set it up in light room so four fingers up means go back to your shop and that means if I get the set up correctly then, when I'm in photo shop four fingers up to bridge before fingers down to get back light room from photocopies for fingers down, flip back up to get back and let's see if we can do that quick over here, it's his application I haven't said to all so our current settings will apply all applications doesn't matter which one we're in if I hit the plus sign here, I can tell toe, add a particular application, I'm gonna come in here and at bridge, and so now if this is highlighted instead of all it means, whatever I set up in here is on ly gonna work that way when bridges running, so I'm going to say, when I'm in bridge, if I swipe down, open a run and I'll tell it to do photo shop where isthe adobe photo shop got too many versions of it in there, all right? So now find up swiping it should launch photoshopped, and then I would add one more, and that would be light room. So I was doing is on the right side is where his plus or minus two say want to add something and in light room, I'm going to say, when I swiped up, I would like it to open a run, and I wanted to open a run photo shop. All right, I'll close this and let's see if it works. If it doesn't, then I've done something weird, but in general, if I'm in photo shop, I take four fingers on my hand, and I just push it down here and swipe up. I'm in bridge, I can access the picture if I want or are you just browsing pictures on that and want that image from bridge let's? Get back for fingers down. I'm right into photo shop, right? And I if I want light room, I don't think light rooms running right now, but it's, four fingers down, I'm in light room four fingers up, come back and photoshopped in that fast. Yeah, the only thing is if you get this set up, whatever doesn't work your fingers aren't separated, they're together. It thinks they're one big finger, so just make sure there's a gap between your fingers so if they're all together and I do it, I'm gonna get the heck back it's not working, just get a gap, but I got a bridge goto photoshopped goto light room go back to photo shop fast, easy, right. Did you have a question? Um, is this specific to that model of tablet using because I have a bamboo pen and touch has gesture functions, but I don't know I don't have a bamboo so it's hard for me to say there'll be some of these features that would be available, but I'm not sure of all hamar depends on the model you have. Uh, one other thing that we have in there is under touch under my gestures is what to do, actually it's under here, the r there's a something called the radio menu and I haven't set up, so if I hit three fingers on this, I get the radio menu and this is something I'm not going to spend the time to set up. I just want to give you a sense for what it is, but the radio menu is something that can just show up on top of whatever program you're using. I get to it by hitting three fingers on here and it just pops up, then I can choose which one of these settings I'd like tapping on it is going to apply it. I could save this document right now, but just doing three fingers and this pops up one of the things that we have set in herewith defaults is saved boom, you can do it, I usually have it set up, so I've brushes and I can tap, and suddenly I could change the flow setting or something like that. Or I could come in here in anything you could access with the keyboard shark cat you can set up in one of these and so I find it to be really nice for very quickly accessing features and that's called the radio menu and you could get to it by doing three fingers on this uh if you have it set up for that and just make sure it's something explored because if you put in there all the things that you frequently use, you're going to find you're so much faster with photoshopped that it's it's almost ridiculous on the side here and left side you can set up various things and the main thing I used there is if I go into my system preferences and get into the functions, I can set up different modifier keys here, so if I want to work on my big screen when I'm at home and I don't need the keyboard instead I want to sit back and have this in my lap like this instead of having to always reach up here to get two things I can have this set up so that I can get two maybe shift option command you know those normal keys that you often have to hold down to get the things I sent him off on these various buttons in that way can very quickly access them and then there's a little ring on here and I can set up that ring to do various things. One of the things I could have a do is for zooming in and out of my document or changing my brush side so I could just swing my finger around this changed my brush size, and therefore I can sit back like this when I'm working changed my brush size with my thumb and then move my thumb up and down teo access the various other buttons here to hold down shift option command and other things when I'm clicking in that way, it can end up painting a lot without having to deal with my keyboard and get near my computer all the time, so it makes sense I've come in here with default settings on this, so I'm gonna show you what it looks like without him to begin with. But I want to make sure you're aware of that and how I think of it and that you can set this up for different applications with different settings just hit the plus sign over here for application, put in a different one in here, like white room or bridge or anything else, and therefore you can set it up to act differently with each once they can optimize it, so any time we use the tablet now, if we go into our brushes, and uh in here you find any of these dynamics where there's a little poppet menu called control if you click on it one of the choices will be called pen pressure it means instead of randomly varying it with a setting called jeter we could really control it with how hard you push with a pen if you set it to pen tilt it could be controlled by what angle you're holding the pen at instead and certain pens can have rotation you have to the special pen for it's called the art penn and I don't have that one here but it would be able to tell what angle this is that if I meaning rotation so if I had something like that uh cloud I could make it so this literally rotates the cloud by rotating the pen uh and or that stitching I could rotate the stitches by moving this around you have to have the art pen for that it looks as far as I know just like this but I don't have the art pen also instead of just working in here you're going to find at the top of your screen you have two choices ah one of which is right here clicking on that is going to make it so the pressure on the pen control so big your brushes the one on the left is going to make it so the pressure on your pen controls the opacity so you're welcome to turn those on it any time if you have a tablet connected and one thing that could be an issue is if you have the touch thing turned on and you reach up here to use your keyboard and you put your hand back, you can actually have your hand touching the tablet here thinking that it should be using this one in reality you're trying to be reaching up here and doing things so one of the things you can have these buttons set teo is the very top one I could just have touched toggle on and off self touch is ever getting in your way just hit that touch off I'm just hitting the button on the top most button if you actually just, um how would I say it? Touch these without pressing them it will give you an overlay on your screen and tell you what they're set for so then you could know the top one currently is set to turn touch on off with touch on and off. It could be nice because I can come in here and go to various images into zoom. I just use two fingers here just like if you're on an ipad or an iphone just pinching and doing things if I use zoom up enough using two fingers on here I scroll around so navigating around your document could be much faster with that touch but if it gets in your way I just hit the top key and now it's ignoring my finger when you use the pen and you have your hand on it it's more than just a finger it's your hand usually ignores your hand it's when you have just a tiny part of your hand that it thinks it's a finger and if you ever have any gesture you're set up for working with more than one finger make sure there's a gap between your fingers if it ever doesn't work so now um and one other quick question did you say what size er welcome was yeah there's a small small yeah when I say small this might physically look large but there's actually little marks on here that marked the corners of the usable area, the tablet and the usable area the tablet this would be the small one they also have a medium and large so I'm going to be switching back and forth between this in this if I need the pressure sensitivity, I'll be grabbing this if I don't I'll be using this just so you can tell wyndham I actually using the functionality of this because I want to let you know you don't have to have a tablet to do a lot of the things that we end up doing in photo shop and I'm just going to use this when we're using the functionality of it if that's what you ever do be very careful with where you put this thing, you will mess yourself up when you said it like this and then you start trying to use your computer and your mouse always tries to go back to the exact same location because it's remembering where the pen is and the pen is going to a very specific part of your screen, you will do that when you're new to it. Also, this little thing comes with it. This is just a holder for your pen. You can either put it in vertically or you can put it on here horizontally like this and just see now in case nobody told you this opens and inside our tips of so that you can replace the tip that's in here with a different one and their various styles. There are kinds that have different feelings on the tip or if you wear your tip down where it's feels too blunt, you replace it with a different one. What I have in here and there's a little tool in the centre for changing it. Uh, this little ring is just a little picture, but I can usually just grab him or use my teeth, but I actually like the one and I really doubt you'll be able to see it on camera it's got a tiny spring in it the one with the tiny spring makes it so. Why hit the surface it's, not a hard hit. Instead, it has him give, and it feels more like a a magic marker, like a really thick highlighter pen or something. Where, when you push you, khun, I feel a little soft impact in there, and so I like that one. But the default one is one of these black ones, which is a little more stiffer feel, and you're welcome, teo, test out the various ones that are inside there. They just go right inside the, uh, that, and just slide it in cool band. That was a fantastic tip. You're good, so keep that away from your tablet if you're not using it otherwise, it's gonna mess with you.