Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to use a
Wacom tablet, I do want to say that I use a small older version Wacom tablet, and it's not one that
you draw on the screen with or anything like that. If you have a Wacom tablet like this one,
you'll probably notice that it's not the same as just drawing with a pencil, and it does take some
time to get used to. Personally, I had to use my Wacom tablet 40 hours or a week before I really
got used to it, and until then I just wanted to toss it out the window and get my mouse back. So
don't give up, don't quit, it does get easier. All right, let's get started. All right, this is my
Wacom tablet, I use Wacom Intuos Pro Pen and Touch Small. So there are touch buttons up here, and you
can actually like, do gestures here. I'm pretty sure that Wacom doesn't offer this tablet anymore,
but there's a current version out there and it'll run you about $100. I actually don't use the
buttons up here, and I don't use the touch part of this pad, since my hand is always on it like this,
and I was having trouble with the tablet thinking I was trying to do some gestures. So if you run
into the same problem, you can get the $80 tablet with no touch options at all. And that's what I
would do if I was going to buy another one today. And both of those links are in my description,
if you want to take a look at those. After you plug your Wacom tablet into your computer,
you'll need to install the drivers. If they don't automatically install, you can just come
out here to Google and search for Wacom drivers, then just come over here to the Wacom website,
you can find your Wacom number on the back of your tablet. You can just type it in here and
then the drivers will come up, and you can just follow the instructions to install this. And if
for some reason you're having trouble with that, or if your computer isn't recognizing it, there
are a few YouTube videos out there troubleshooting that problem, so you can take a look at those. And
you can always reach out to Wacom themselves. They have pretty good customer support. When
you first install everything, you might notice that when you're moving around the screen, you
are accidentally selecting everything or clicking on things, and that's because you need to hover
just above the tablet. I keep my pen nib about a quarter inch, or just a couple millimeters away
from the tablet. And that's how you move around the screen. Then if you want to select something,
then you'll actually touch the tablet itself. You'll probably also notice that your pen moves
much faster than a mouse would. And that's because of the four corners. This one actually has dots on
it, and you can kind of see them - they're here, here, here, and here. These four dots represent
the screen. So that is here, here, here and here on your screen, those dots. Now I actually have
mine set right now to about this size, instead of all the way out here. And the reason I do that
is because if I just want to jump from this corner to this corner, I can do that in much less space
than coming all the way out here. And I know a lot of people who only have a section this small
set to their entire screen, and it makes it just a lot faster to move around the screen.
But it does take a lot of time to get used to. With a mouse you're picking up and dragging like
this to get to different parts of your screen. But you don't do this with a Wacom...at least
if you've installed your drivers, this should not be happening. So you can just get to your
screen really fast by just moving like this. Okay, so let's go to our System Preferences,
and we'll look at the Wacom settings. So on the tablet itself, we've got a button here and here,
and then here and here also, and we can set these here to be different things if
we want to. Now I don't use these, but this is where you can change that. For example,
this one is Shift and OPTION. This one is CMD and CTRL right now, if I wanted to use those. You
can also change the pen setting so you can change how the eraser feels. This is actually an eraser,
I never use that either. I just use E to get to the eraser tool in Photoshop or Shift E and
Illustrator just feels faster than actually turning your pin upside down and doing this.
I do use this button. There are actually two buttons here. There's a forward rock and a
backward rock. I use the backward rock to right click, and you can see that you can set that up
here. I don't use the forward click at all but you can set it up to a lot of different things too.
You can mess around also with how soft or firm your tip feel is, the double click distance,
and that kind of thing. I generally just leave these alone. Now mapping for me is really
important. I usually have my entire screen mapped to just one small area like I told you earlier.
So we can set our screen area to full and then our tablet area to a portion which is what I did.
And I want to make this even smaller, so I've just changed it. And now it takes
very little movement on my wrist to get all the way up here to the right corner.
And all the way down here is about two or three inches, so it's not very far. And we'll say OK.
We also have a lot of touch options: pointer speed, double tap time, I always set this to
the system preference. Most of these things I just leave as is. And then we also have gestures,
so you can do one tap, two taps to do different things, if you wanted to do that. As I said,
I'm always accidentally having it move and do things I don't want it to do, so I completely turn
this off. And you can also set on-screen controls, so you could set some of these things to do
undo if you wanted to do that. All right, I'm going to get out of the preferences,
and I'm going to head over to Photoshop, which is where most people use a tablet. So I wanted
to show you what the behavior is for a tablet in Photoshop. Okay, we'll create a new document,
and I'll just ...didn't really matter what size. One big reason that people love tablets
is because they support pressure sensitivity. And in Photoshop, anything that behaves like a brush,
you can use pressure sensitivity for. So I'm going to hit B on my keyboard, I'm going to
make my cursor size just a little bit smaller and harden it. I'm going to open my Brushes Window,
and then I'm going to choose just a hard round pressure brush. I'm going to click and just
press harder as I go. You can see we get that nice gradual increase in size, and now I can turn this
around and erase with my eraser tool. As I said, I never really do that, I just hit E on my keyboard
and erase that way. Okay, so let's look at our brush settings. This is also under Window > Brush
Settings. We can create new brushes or modify the ones we have with some of these options like Shape
Dynamics. We can change the Size Jitter. And you can see what's going to happen down here.
Shape Dynamics has to do with how the curve is, or not. So if we turn this on,
you can see we get that pressure sensitivity look, and if we turn it off, that's gone. So
you'll always want to have Shape Dynamics on if you're using pressure sensitivity. So you can
kind of take the time to go through these and kind of increase these and see what happens.
Now as I said, anything that behaves like a brush, so that would include your Eraser tool,
tools like the Stamp tool, the Clone tool. Let's get out of Photoshop and head to Illustrator. We
also have pressure sensitivity here. If you go to your Brushes flyout and go to Open Brush Library,
some of these will have pressure sensitivity, or at least they should. Sometimes they won't want to
work right - I'll link a video to troubleshoot, if your, like, your calligraphic brushes
don't have pressure sensitivity, there are a few things that might be the problem. Okay, so I'm
going to choose this one, I'm going to hit B on my keyboard, I'm going to just click and drag.
And you can see how it gradually gets bigger as I press harder on the tablet. Now you probably also
noticed that sort of fixed itself and made itself really smooth. To manage that, you
can just double click on your brushes and drag this all the way over to smooth. And that will
really help when you're drawing to keep that smoothness. Now you might find it a little bit
challenging to type when you're holding the Wacom. Do you put it down? Do you try to kind of type and
hold it at the same time? Here's what I do, and almost everyone that I know who really uses them
a lot, we just switch to this. We go from this to this and start typing over here. And then we come
back to our Wacom. So we don't actually let go of the pen or put it down or anything like that.
We just hold it between our thumb and forefinger. So some of the challenges that I've personally
found that took me a while to get used to are that when I'm trying to select something,
I'll actually move it a little bit, and that can be a big problem. That's just something
that will come with time. But at first you're going to be accidentally moving things a lot.
If you're in a program like InDesign, you'll probably be really used to scrolling with your
Magic Mouse, if you have a Magic Mouse. I've got an extended keyboard, so I've been just using
Page Up and Page Down over by the delete key on my keyboard. Now a lot of times I'll just switch over
and use my MacBook's trackpad and do it there. So that is one of the things I do miss about not
having a mouse. And the other things I already mentioned, which are typing and getting used to
just the difference in moving with a Wacom instead of a mouse, did take some time. But seriously,
it's so much faster for me to use a Wacom that I cannot imagine going back to a mouse
at this point. All right, if you liked this video and you want to see more videos like this,
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time a new video comes out. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!