Wacom Tablet start-up guide

Nina Mingioni www.ninamingioni.com

Why all photographers need a tablet to edit

Getting a tablet has been on my to-do list for a long time.

When I finally got one, I was so intimidated – both by the tablet and the set up it may need – that I didn’t actually set it up for good 8 months.

Guess what? I now can’t edit without it! I was so afraid of the learning curve, and how steep it would be. It took literally a couple of days, and I was in love.

I think all photographers – especially those who use photoshop to edit – absolutely need a tablet.

 Your arm will thank you. Ergonomics are WAY better than when yo are using a mouse. Because you are using a pen instead of a mouse, it is so much easier on your wrist. Ever get a cramp in your hand after a whole evening of editing? No more!

 Precision is unparalleled. I once heard someone describe editing with a mouse as editing with a potato (or a brick).That person was spot on. Even with zooming in, a mouse will never get as close as a pen stylus will, because the movements of your hand and wrist with a pen are so much more precise (decades of training, right?) than the lateral movements of your wrist and arm while holding a mouse.

 It is guaranteed to speed up your workflow. You can make shortcuts for the buttons – not only on the pen stylus, but also on the tablet itself.

 The pen stylus is pressure sensitive. That means that I don’t have to change the opacity of my brush. Touch the pen stylus lightly for low opacity, and push harder for higher opacity. You can set this up for other things to – brush flow, brush size, etc.

I think the most intimidating thing about the tablet is the setup itself. I am hoping that this little guide will walk you through the set-up in an easy way. Trust me, you won’t regret it!

Ready?

Wacom tablet basics

 Your tablet surface represents your computer screen. The lit corners of the tablet represent the corners of your screen.

 The stylus (aka “pen”) is just a mouse. The nib of the stylus (the tip) is a left click button. The toggle switch on the pen actually has two buttons. The bottom one is set as “right click” by the manufacturer.

 You don’t have to touch the stylus to the tablet surface for you to see your cursor move on the screen. Simply moving your stylus above the tablet surface will move the cursor. Once your stylus actually touches the surface of the tablet, you have “left clicked”.

 Your tablet can work as a giant trackpad and can be manipulated with your fingers if you so choose. This option can be easily turned on and off. When editing with a stylus, it is the easiest to turn it off to prevent your hand from activating the touch surface as you draw on the pad.

 Your tablet can work with ANY software. Of course, Photoshop is what it’s really made for.

 You can customize absolutely all buttons and functions on your pen and tablet. This doesn’t mean that you should do it the first day you start playing with it. In fact, I would discourage it on day 1 because it will just confuse you.

 The pen stylus should never be stored with your real writing instruments. In fact, it comes with its own upright holder that leaves your nib pressure-free to prevent it from getting damaged in storage.

 The pen holder actually has two parts. Twist it open! There are lots of nibs inside, and a tool to help you change your nibs when the time comes. Don’t do this today. I only mentioned this so that you know.

 Your tablet senses how much pressure you apply to the pen. This means that you can set your pen stylus to do different things. For example, you can set your pen to change opacity of the brush – light pressure will give small brush opacity, and opacity will increase as you push the pen harder against the tablet. You can do the same thing with brush size. This is just an fyi, more later!

Getting Started

1. Install your tablet software and your tablet on your computer. Just follow the manufacturer’s directions, this is the easy part.

2. Before you do any photography-based set-up, you need to get comfortable using your stylus pen as a mouse. This is the fun part. You know what works best?

Minesweeper. I read somewhere that Minesweeper was designed by Microsoft to get people comfortable using the mouse (right/left click, etc). It works beautifully for this, too. There is a great free web-based minesweeper here: http://www.freeminesweeper.org/

-It’s an easy game and you will figure it out in a couple of clicks. The numbers represent the number of bombs in vicinity. You Left-click on the square to see what’s underneath. If you know where a bomb must be, you can mark that square by right-clicking it.

-now try it with your pen and tablet. Note how you don’t actually have to touch the pen to the tablet for you to see how the cursor moves across the screen. Left click by touching the pen to the tablet. Right click by pushing the bottom of the toggle switch on the pen stylus (this is the manufacturer’s preset).

-sit and play for as long as it takes your hand to feel comfortable with the motions. Once you are entirely comfortable, move onto step 3.

3. Open your tablet preferences.

- On Mac, it is found under the “system preferences”

- On a PC, the easiest way to find it is when the tablet is on, find the tablet icon in your systems tray, and right click on it, and open “tablet properties”

-From there on, both windows and mac look the same!

4. Your tablet is reversible. If you are left-handed, you can change the handedness of your tablet so that your writing hand does not hit the shortcut buttons. You can do this by clicking on the “option…” button at the very bottom of the tablet properties window, and selecting “left-handed” option.

Let’s do some basic set-up!

Your view may be a little different than mine because I no longer have the manufacturer’s presets there.

 In the top row, you should see your tablet listed. (if you have more than one tablet eventually, you can set them up there).

 in the middle “tool” row, you will see “functions”, “touch”, and

“grip pen”

 in the bottom row, “applications”, you should just see “all other”.

Before you click on anything else, go ahead and open your editing software on your computer (photoshop, lightroom, etc. open each one please). Now, it will be easy to add them. Click on the little “+” icon to the right of the row. All open applications are listed; choose all your editing applications and add them. This is done because you can have same buttons perform different functions in different applications. Again, we are not there yet, but it will help you in the future.

Now your top panel will look like this:

Next thing we will do is change a couple of pen options. Make sure

“grip pen” is selected under “tools” and “photoshop” is selected under “application”

Tip feel is something completely personal. I find that I work better with it if it’s firmer. Since I use my pen pressure to change opacity of the brush (basically, the lighter I touch the pen to the tablet, the lower the opacity, the harder I push, the higher is the opacity), I find that if I make the tip feel “softer”, even the lightest touch gives me too much opacity. You can see my exact settings above. I suggest starting there, and adjusting it later when you know what you are looking for.

Since double click is not something that you usually need in PS, I suggest turning the “tip double click distance” to “off”. This way two clicks that are farther away from each other will not register as a “double click.”

Leave tilt sensitivity “normal” for the time being.

For your toggle button on the pen stylus, the bottom part functions very well as a “right click” so I would leave it as-is

I suggest modifying the top of the toggle button. Since double click is almost never useful in PS as a shortcut, better things can be customized there. Some people like to customize it to “step back” (ctrl+alt+Z in PC, command+option+Z on Mac), but I find that for me, it works best as an “alt” button (“option” on Mac). It makes selecting the source when using a clone-stamp brush very quick, and quickly activates a color picker to select a color when using a brush tool.

To change it to an “alt/option”, click on the corresponding menu, and select “modifier”. From the pop-up menu, choose

“alt/option”. For “step back”, select “keystroke” and push the needed buttons. Again, I suggest “alt/option” for now.

Now you are ready for Photoshop

Open a blank white document so that you can play with your stylus.

Select the “brush” tool and pick up your pen stylus!

Look at your brush panel at the top of the screen.

There are two icons at the top that will help you choose what happens as you push the pen harder against your tablet.

-the first one, marked in magenta, when selected, makes your pen pressure control brush opacity.

-the second one, marked in yellow, when selected, makes your pen pressure control brush size.

Here is my example of what happens when you use either button.

Example 1. Neither button is selected. Your pen is no different than what you would get with a mouse.

Example 2. Pressure controls opacity. Note that as I applied more pressure, my brush opacity changed.

Example 3. Pressure controls size. Note that as I applied more pressure, my brush size changed.

Example 4. Pressure controls BOTH size and opacity because both buttons are selected. As I apply more pressure, both size and opacity of the brush change.

Now that you understand what all these options do, I will tell you that most likely you will just use the opacity control all the time. You can set up custom brushes to do lots of other interesting things, but this is beyond this basic tutorial.

Notice, we have not yet customized any tablet buttons yet. However, you can already take advantage of so many benefits of the tablet.

Where to go from here? Make a 3 day commitment to your tablet.

Next time you are in Photoshop, put away your mouse and turn on your tablet.

Tablet button set-up

Your Wacom comes with 8 rectangular "express" buttons on the left side of the tablet (right side, if you are a leftie). As anything that has to do with the Wacom, what you choose to set those to is entirely up to you. I will share what I found useful and not useful.

Before we start playing with the set-up you should know that holding your finger lightly against any of the buttons without actually pressing it will bring up a mock-up of your buttons on your computer screen (in case you forgot what is where!)

The top button is touch on/touch off. I would keep that as-is. I use touch function sometimes to operate the tablet with my hands in the software that is not PS or LR. I keep touch function “off” at baseline as I edit to prevent my hand from activating the tablet and moving my cursor.

Second buttons is “settings” – brings up a screen with all the settings in one place. This is useful when you are first starting out. When you are an experienced tablet user, you can change this to anything that you need.

Third one is “precision mode” – again, I kept this one. Holding this button and clicking on the area of the screen brings up a highlit little screen that lets you really close-in on a tiny area. Good for fine masking, etc.

Fourth button is “display toggle” – this is good if you have multiple monitors. Since I have just one, this is the fist button I can customize.

Then comes the touch ring – this is a separate discussion below.

The bottom four buttons are shift, control/command, alt/option, and pan/scroll. These are just as easily activated by the keyboard if you are sitting next to one, so I have these modified as well.

How to custom set-up your buttons

Click on the menu next to the button mock-up.

- “modifier” is a combination of shift, Ctrl/Command, Alt/option, and mouse clicks

- “keystroke” is a combination of any of the function buttons and letter shortcuts.

Here is my set-up for Wacom buttons in PS:

(see explanation for Ctrl/Alt/R-click below!)

Suggestions for frequently used shortcuts

Ctrl+N New layer

Ctrl+J Duplicate layer

Ctrl+I Invert (mask)

Ctrl+T Transform

Ctrl+L Levels

Ctrl+M Curves

Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E Stamp visible

Ctrl+Alt+E Merge visible

A very cool brush shortcut:

-Ctrl+Alt+R click and move stylus pen left and right (above the tablet without touching it) to control brush size

-Ctrl+Alt+R click and move stylus pen up and down (above the tablet without touching it) to control brush hardness

….and this is why I have one of my shortcut buttons set-up as

Ctrl+alt+R click!

Touch ring set-up

Here’s my set-up. I use brush size vast majority of the time, so it’s first. I find “rotate” useful for some fine brush work, when turning the image is easier on the wrist.

Radial menus – for even further customization. You will need to set up one of your buttons to activate a radial menu. At this point, I am not even using mine, too many options! The set-up is handled in the same way though.

Bonus: Another cool trick for your pen stylus

As you may have by now figured out, the back of your pen stylus works as an eraser. Some love it, others do not. I personally find that

I get better erasing but choosing an eraser tool and using the regular end of my pen stylus. One cool trick I found is setting the back end as a “Save” option – so a quick tap on the tablet saves your document. Make sure “Photoshop” icon is selected when you do this.

Using your tablet as a touch-pad

Finally, to maximize your use of your tablet, you should learn some basic gestures. If you have no idea what I am talking about, here is a short youtube video: https://youtu.be/zLvEbid9BNU

Make sure your "touch" feature is "ON" - top button is the manufacturer preset

Full gesture guide for Wacom tablets is available here: https://www.wacom.com/~/media/files/store-manuals/wacomgesture-guide.pdf