Wacom Tablet

[hairlesswookiee]

does anyone here use one??? i'm thinking about picking up one of the Bamboo fun tablets. they aren't terribly expensive and i don't think i'll need one of the bigger ones at the moment. i just wanted to know who here uses them and what you think about it.

[creature4000]

They're pretty cool. The only thing I like using them for is Photoshop.. the rest is meh.

[hairlesswookiee]

cool thanks...i just ordered a Genius tablet off of Newegg.

[minivader]

been using them since 2003, they are great for any graphic work, photoshop, illustrator, movies, audio, flash, etc. much better for your wrist too. if you can, splurge on the more expensive and bigger ones, you'll can really tell the difference, and they are very durable too.

[Polystoner]

been using them since 2003, they are great for any graphic work, photoshop, illustrator, movies, audio, flash, etc. much better for your wrist too. if you can, splurge on the more expensive and bigger ones, you'll can really tell the difference, and they are very durable too.

I have to agree with minivader, the bigger ones are much better for daily usage. But use the smaller one to see if you like controlling the tools with the pad. It took me several months to feel completely comfortable using the Wacoms with Photoshop. Especially with some of the pressure options for the filters and stuff. I really like it for Illustrator, much more control over how the lines go down when freehanding a sketch before final tweaking in Illustrator.

[MaulFan]

Love my Wacom tablet, it's allowed me to make much better hair for my Photoshop illustrations, here's a sample of it put to work, all the hair strands were drawn with the airbrush tool on my Wacom Tablet in Photoshop.

http://www.swmmedia.com/MAULART/R4.jpg

[Amanaman]

I've been putting it off for too long, but I should get one. The Intuos is the best one, right? I'm using it for art, and for general purpose use too.

[SideshowDennis]

I've been using the Graphire and can't complain. But if you really want the best, go for a Cintiq.:joy

[foolkiller]

I have one at home and one at work. I only use it only for drawing character animation in Flash, not as a mouse substitute.

[darthviper107]

Wacom tablets really are the best. Right now I'm using my brother's Intuos and it's pretty awesome. It makes it a lot easier for art stuff. Although I'd really like a Cintiq, that would be cool. I wonder how that would be for games, since you could just touch the screen to shoot someone, it would be pretty killer for the PC.

[hairlesswookiee]

i ended up buying a Genius brand tablet. it ended being $105 after shipping. so far i havent had a whole lot of time to play with it though.

[hairlesswookiee]

Love my Wacom tablet, it's allowed me to make much better hair for my Photoshop illustrations, here's a sample of it put to work, all the hair strands were drawn with the airbrush tool on my Wacom Tablet in Photoshop.

http://www.swmmedia.com/MAULART/R4.jpg

nice... what programs are there that allow me to draw freehand?? i'm on a Mac for reference.

[binky]

For free hand drawing, I'd recommend Corel Painter Essentials (the full version is probably overkill for most people), which comes bundled with some tablets, or is about $70 standalone at amazon or buy.com. I use it on Windows Vista, but I hear good things using it with a Mac, too. You can also just use Photoshop using their pen, fill, and airbrush tools, but Painter is a dedicated drawing program so it's loaded with various brushes and media and effects.

My tablet is an Intuos 6x11 widescreen which I've had for a little over a year. I only use it for photoshop (photo retouching) and Corel Painter (freehand drawing). Never got used to using it as a mouse, but when my mouse (USB) fails to initialize, the Wacom's always worked, so it can act as a backup. Expensive (about $350), but I'm sure it easily outweighs the damage to my wrists continuing to use a mouse for Photoshop and Painter even to me as a casual user would have.

The Cintiq is just too expensive for anyone but a pro. It makes more sense to me to just buy a tablet PC, which has the advantage of being portable. My brother has a 13" and it cost him just about as much as the 12" Cintiq would have.

[dedguy]

I've been using an Intuos3 6x11 for for a few years now. I use it for everything from Illustrator and Photoshop work to just browsing the net. Anyone who has a tablet, especially if you work on a computer all day, I highly suggest trying it as a mouse replacement. When I got out of retail and got a job in website design I started to get serious wrist pain and fatigue. I eventually started to use my pen instead of mouse and all that stopped. I also now find it's much faster to work using the stylus.

The only thing I use a mouse for is playing games.

As far as the Cintiq goes, maybe it's just the lack of me being able to buy one talking, but the idea of my hands on the screen itself isn't appealing to me. Part of why I enjoy drawing on my computer so much more than on paper is the freedom of not having my giant hands in the way all the time. I don't constantly have to move my hand away from the paper to see what the hell I'm doing.

[wookster]

Wacom's (or something similar) are essential if you expect to get any good results from photoshop, hell I use it for eveything. It's great for vectored work in Freehand and Illustrator as well and comes in handy for 3D applications. I use an oversized A4 one.
Here are a few jobs done on it-
http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r262/retskoow/FettSolo.jpg
http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r262/retskoow/FettSlave.jpg
http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r262/retskoow/Bobbafett1.jpg
http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r262/retskoow/Speeders.jpg
http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r262/retskoow/Anthea.jpg
http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r262/retskoow/Venom2.jpg
http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r262/retskoow/Pred%20bust/05MagDPS2.jpg
http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r262/retskoow/Pred%20bust/0650sstyle.jpg
http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r262/retskoow/Pred%20bust/09SkyNight.jpg
http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r262/retskoow/Pred%20bust/13SunStyle.jpg

[occulum]

havet used one in forever but heres' an Illustration I did for work years back.
Wish I had more time to play arond with a Wacom in Painter.

http://www.lazyeyestudios.com/Illustration3D/Paint.jpg

[wookster]

havet used one in forever but heres' an Illustration I did for work years back.
Wish I had more time to play arond with a Wacom in Painter.

http://www.lazyeyestudios.com/Illustration3D/Paint.jpg

Thats a great piece of work. I've never used painter, is it simple to use or a pain in the ***?

[occulum]

thanks!
the full version is VERY in depth and has very realistic painting options. Its awesome IMO.
and the newer Wacoms even read the tilt of your stylus from what I understand.

now that i think of it, for this piece I actually laid the elements out totally in Illustrator as vector art and then took it to painter and went over it to add the brush strokes...

[occulum]

I havent used it in forever and this may be a moot point now, but it used to be a pain if you were working on anything that wasnt low resolution. If you werent on a FAST computer, curved strokes would lag and end up with straight lines in some areas. I didnt like doing final pieces at low res. I always wanted to make things hi res enough to print out nicely if I wanted to.
but like I said, this was 5+ years ago and may be a non-issue now ...
I ran into the same problem using a wacom in photoshop....

[wookster]

I might try and have a go with it. Never had any major probs with Photoshop for a while, back when I had my old power mac though it really used to chug along,and you had to remember to save everything very regularly, I had a few major screw ups after working for ages without a save, only to see that lovely little 'bomb' icon appear.
But now we havs OSX, and I haven't locked up since.

[dedguy]

I haven't used it in forever and this may be a moot point now, but it used to be a pain if you were working on anything that wasnt low resolution. If you werent on a FAST computer, curved strokes would lag and end up with straight lines in some areas. I didnt like doing final pieces at low res. I always wanted to make things hi res enough to print out nicely if I wanted to.
but like I said, this was 5+ years ago and may be a non-issue now ...
I ran into the same problem using a wacom in photoshop....

No matter what you do it's going to be dependent on your machine. These days I tend to do my sketching in AI which is independent of resolution (for the most part). It only really starts to bog down if you have a massive number of points or many raster effects (feather, gradients, drop shadow, etc).

This is an example of a sketch in AI:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3253/2444729102_81a1da0912_o.png

Compare to a similar sketch I did in PS:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3100/2336973309_fc3b3ff534_o.png

Since I do most/all of my finished work in AI, this is pretty ideal for me. If you're doing a painting though, of course this isn't so great, although you can achieve some nice painterly effects in AI.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3265/2568235951_b0a47901fd_o.png

For painting though I highly suggest checking out ArtRage (http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html). It's cheap, lightweight, and pretty damn nice. I like it a lot more than Painter personally and at a fraction of the cost.