Free hand gestures are more precise, feel natural to work with, and make your masking and cloning (and healing, dodging, burning, and everything else involving a brush) look much better and more realistic. I usually control size and opacity on the brushes with pen pressure (except for healing brush, when I just control the size) simply because it makes masking and cloning much easier and natural. Actually, you can control almost all aspects in any brush via pen pressure. Once you have your Wacom tablet all set up and working and you open Photoshop (for this you’ll basically have had to set it up all over again), you can finally make use of pen pressure. You can find all sorts of tutorials and videos online that address all the different headache-inducing issues, but for the most part, they are easy to fix. Luckily, the new drivers made it work, but I had to edit some files by hand. I had this issue with Windows interfering with the Wacom driver which made precise work a pain. I have to be honest with you: conflicts concerning drivers will be a problem you will have to deal with, on occasion. I’ve caught myself using the pen tablet to browse the web by habit. Once you do, you’ll find that the mouse is actually rather redundant. If you are used to trackpads (which are relative position trackers) it will feel really unusual, but just give it some time, and you will get used to it. So the top right corner on the pen tablet will always be the top right corner of the screen. Using a pen tablet could be a totally new concept for you, and at first it will feel weird due to the absolute positioning of the tablet – the surface area of the tablet corresponds exactly to the screen.

Speaking from my personal experience, I can say that if you are switching from mouse to pen tablet for the first time, there are some things that you need to consider. I had my doubts about the effectiveness of pen tablets, but because mouse-accuracy is so limited, I decided to buy the Intuos S Wacom Tablet, which has a working area of 10×15 cm and was the cheapest on the market. That is why I decided to buy a pen tablet even though I was skeptical at first. Even if a mouse had one million DPI, you would still be facing the problem that the accuracy depends on your arm, and not your palm (which is more dexterous and accurate). I can easily change the sensitivity, I have macro keys at my disposal, and I can even change the weight.īut it is still just a mouse. So far, I've gone through only two PC mice: one a generic Deluxe 800 dpi mouse (which didn't last for more than 6 months), and the other a Verbatim Rapier V1 3200 dpi laser mouse, which is still kicking after 6 years of regular abuse. I’ve been editing my photos with a computer mouse for more than half a decade.

Computer thinks tablet is a mouse