I was talking to an owner of a Wacom tablet one day and he was raving about how much easier the tablet makes it to work with his photographs. He does model shoots on a part-time basis and has a set procedure he uses in Photoshop with all of his shots.
I asked him if he used the pressure sensitive settings with Opacity or Size or did he switch back and forth between them? He got a puzzled look on his face and said he had no idea what I was talking about.
Now this fellow knew a lot more about Photoshop than I do but he had no idea how to set up his tablet with the Brushes Palette – so I showed him how.
He was amazed – he was excited and his work went to a higher level of professionalism.
This is not the first time I have discovered that a lot of Wacom tablet users do not seem to be aware of the brush settings one can make in Photoshop.
To change the size of the brush or its opacity without a tablet installed you need to make adjustments using either keyboard shortcuts or make the adjustment at the top of the screen.
With the Graphire installed these two adjustments (Brush Size and Opacity) move from the keyboard or screen to the pen.
Your job is to tell Photoshop how to react when you change the brush pressure.
___________________________________ NOTE: The drivers for your tablet, (both Bamboo and Intuos3) which are included in the box absolutely must be installed for any of the special tablet features to work! If you use the pen on your tablet with no drivers installed then the pen acts just like a mouse and you do not want that to happen! In addition, you will have the power of the pressure sensitivity and the great resolution of your tablet. I have often been amazed to discover that tablet users have not installed the drivers and still love their Tablet. If you have lost the CD with the drivers you can download the latest drivers from Wacom Support. ___________________________________
Brush Setting Video
Here is how you do it ...
Photoshop
In Photoshop 7, Photoshop CS, CS2 and CS3 the pressure sensitive settings are found in the Brushes Palette that is typically docked in the Palette Well. If it is not visible press F5 or Windows > Brushes.
Photoshop has 19 tools that will react according to the pressure applied so with the addition of a Bamboo or Intuos you effectively have about 57 new brush options at your disposal.
Not a bad deal, is it?
Brush Palette
The most important and useful settings in the Brush Palette are:
Shape Dynamics
Other Dynamics
Color Dynamics
Brushes Palette Click for Larger View
The first thing to do is to click on each name in order (that is Shape Dynamics, Other Dynamics and Color Dynamics) and in the pop up dialogue that appears click the drop down menu and choose “Pen Pressure”.
What this does is tell Photoshop that each one of these settings will react to your individual pen pressure if the option is selected.
Shape Dynamics
This setting changes the size of the brush (the shape) according to how hard you are pressing your Bamboo or Intuos pen onto the tablet.
Brush Setting - Size Click For Larger View
Light pressure creates a thin line and the heaviest pressure creates a line that is as thick as your master brush setting at the time.
If you look at the bottom of the Brush Palette you will see an example of the brush changing with pressure.
Other Dynamics
This setting changes the opacity of the brush stroke according to the pressure you apply. Light pressure creates a faint stroke and heavy pressure creates a darker stroke up to 100%.
Brush Setting - Opacity Click for Larger View
This is an extremely useful brush setting as you will see in the tablet techniques. What this setting does is free you from having to constantly go to the top bar to make changes to Opacity.
It is particularly useful when you are making local changes to an image (that is, only one small part of the image).
It is likely you will use Shape (size) and Other (opacity) settings most often.
Color Dynamics
This is a really interesting setting.
With light pressure the brush stroke is the background color you have set. As you press harder the color gradually changes to the foreground color and with maximum pressure the brush stroke is the foreground color.
I could not figure out what to do with this setting for the longest time until I wanted to color a line drawing of a lion. I set the foreground and background colors to be almost identical, selected color dynamics and varied my pen pressure as I painted in the picture. It worked quite well because I had a lot of different shades in the drawing.
Questions?
OK ... that's it for brush settings. Knowing how to optimize your tablet and your software makes an enormous difference in your end product.
If you have any questions on the different settings please let me know through the
Contact Page.
Return to the Photoshop Tutorials page from
Photoshop Brush Settings
