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Basic Introduction to Using a Wacom Tablet with Photoshop

Hi there. This section of the course is all about brushes so we, it would be rude of me not to mention tablet. Okay. When we're working with brushes and we'll do that for this video but then after that, don't worry if you don't have a tablet like this thing here. Okay. It's got a tablet. It comes to a little pen and basically it's a replacement for the mouse but it allows you to kind of hand gesture draw. So if you don't have one of these it's fine. Okay, we'll just this video, we're gonna cover this in case you do have one or want to get one. But then after that we'll just get into using the mouse for some of the more special effect inks, splat type kind of cool brushes. So what is this? It's just a mouse. Okay. But obviously I can draw on it instead of using the kind of normal mouse and what you're looking for is that you don't have one and you're looking to buy one. My advice is I've had a few of these over the time. Wakame is the name of the brand most popular with it. Okay, so wak...

ame tablet. They have a few different brands and this one here is called the Into US Pro. Um it depends on your budget. Right? This one here is expensive enough. Us dollars. Can't do the conversions brought in new Zealand live in europe us dollars, it's probably about three or $300 so it's not cheap but if you're going to invest in one. Don't get an Ebay cheap knockoff brand, I've never heard this don't work okay because you need something called, I'm not sure, I'm sure like it's a it's a 60 pen. That's what welcome call it basically what it does is it knows the angle that your pen is at, which is cool when you're using like you tell it to be a crayon and it knows which edge of the crayon it's on and also it knows the pressure. Also if you flip it around you can turn some drawing okay then flip it around and the back part of it is the eraser. There's some just cool stuff. Also what you're not gonna be able to see probably is there some buttons and I those, those can preset for Photoshop and like you can wave your finger around that one and it does the brush size and undo is my top key. And like there's some some some cool shortcuts you can do with these wake on tablets. So if you want one you don't need one to be a hotspot designer. But if you're going to be doing digital illustration man, you'll see the difference in the next little section about me drawing with my mouse and drawing with this. I love it. Do I use it every day I put it out here on my desk, especially in these like videos to make it look like I'm like hardcore digital designer but I find them, I don't like them for normal mouse operations, I use just my regular mouse or the trackpad. Okay, but for when I'm doing retouching or if I'm doing some drawings and that, I definitely use that. Okay, so, and you can just have both of them on your desk. That was wireless, which is really cool as well. It's one of the perks for that one, so you can kind of have it up on your knee sketching away and see it on the screen is a little bit of a weird disconnect. But yeah, super cool. The bamboos are the cheaper versions of these and they are cool, they just don't come with all the extra buttons and stuff. So definitely bamboo would be the entry level. Then you get the, into its prey into us, into its pro and then you get to this antique antique, you need to sell when your kidneys to get to get one. Um so they're expensive, they're in there like two grand kind of thing because basically the screen you draw on so you can actually see what you're doing. So if you're super keen and you got the cash do that. I probably still wouldn't want one. I like, I like that one. I like the way I'm okay with the disconnect between the screen. I'm now rambling. Let's go actually see what it does and why it's so awesome and why you may or may not need a wacom tablet. It's jumping alright. One more thing. This is just an introduction to the welcome table. It's not gonna be like a hardcore how to get the best out of it. It's just gonna be giving you the basics in case you do have one but not like every single thing advanced feature of the wacom tablet. It's my asterix. All right now let's jump in. Alright, first up let's go to file. Let's go to open and in 14 brushes. Open up brush. Oh one. Obviously you can use any image you like but if you are using any image to zoom a little bit just make sure you're working on its own layer. We don't want to destroy the background. So I'm gonna name it. I'm calling it drawing. So to get started we need a couple of things, we need the brush tool which is this guy here underneath the spot, healing brush. We need to pick foreground color. So click on this color here, slide through this, decide on the color that you want to use, click OK. And at the top here, drop this down. So depending on the version of Photoshop you're using if it's like 2000 and 17 or before you probably just got a bunch of icons you can click through, You'll be able to work out which is which it shouldn't be a hard change what they've done in 2018 and 19 is they've created these awesome like little groups general brushes. Dry media wet brushes. So we're going to start with just these first two and we'll get into some other videos where we look at more special effect brushes. So to start with under general brushes, I am going to pick This one here called Hard and Round and we'll show you the difference between that wacom tablet and a regular mouse. So on the side here I am going to click hold and draw d my name dan. Okay, now let's undo that. That was exceptionally bad. I'm bad with my mouse. It's not getting any better. You can play around with smoothing to try and help make your mouse feel a bit better. But I guess I just want to show you the difference between my drawing when I'm working with my mouth. I'm pretty good with my mouse and that's as good as I got. And let's switch to my wacom tablet and all I'm doing is picking up the pen. You don't need to switch them. You just start using the wacom tablet and they start working. So I'm going to do with the wakame. But what we're going to use is we're going to use one of the special wakame brushes basically. Anything that says pressure, see that you can kind of tell they have like pointy ends. Okay, so it has a variable pressure rating and that's what gives the wacom tablet. It's magic. Okay, so I'm going to draw an A and you can see instantly things are smoother because I'm just better at drawing with a pencil and you can start to see see the ends here. They're just nicer. There's like pressure sensitivity. So there's an end in the beginning and it's really sensitive. Watch this. I'll just kind of slightly touch it okay. You can push really hard and get a big blob or just touchy touch to get a nice little bit cool. So pressure sensitivity is the big thing with a wacom tablet. But when you tie it together with some of the other brushes, especially the new version, so general brushes pretty basic. It's the dry media brushes we're going to use like these ones here, Kyle Webster was like, what was he still, He still exists. But he was like freelance. He was the man to go to, to buy brushes from, from Photoshop. Like if you wanted brushes, the building ones weren't very good. The ones that he made were amazing. And now he works for adobe. So he's now bundled them or at least adobe and him have bundled them in here for us to use straight out of the box. That's so good. We're not going to go through them all obviously. But let's just start with one of them and let's door my in. I'm actually gonna make the brush size a lot bigger. Just out of the box. They just look very realistic. Not sure what I'm doing I'm doing in. That's what I'm trying to draw. Okay, but they are pressure sensitive so I can push hard and they get thicker Okay? And fill out more and then I can push really lightly and they can taper off. They're just amazing. Love them some undoing going step backwards. So before we go any further, I do want to mention the undo. So By default, yours is set to 50 undoes. And when you're drawing hand drawing, you can burn through 100 little brushstrokes quite quickly. You can go and change it on a Mac, you go down to Photoshop CC preferences and we're going to go to this one called Performance on a pc. It's in a slightly different places under edit all the way down the bottom here is preferences and you're going to end up at the same place we want to go to Performance. Already. Cranked up to 100 by default, it's 50. If you're using a really earlier version, it's lower. 25 or something. I like 100 gives me a little bit of undoes to go backwards but know that the higher this is the potentially more stressed out, your computer can be, I've got a pretty new Macbook Pro, you might be using a really fancy pc. Okay, so you can go a little higher but no, if you go up to 1000 it's gonna eventually die because it's trying to remember too many things. It's going up to 100. Alright, so that's gonna be it for the basics, it's looking for pressure sensitivity, changing brush size. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna kind of sketch that thing like you saw at the beginning. I'm gonna use I like this one here, pastel palooza. Such a good name. Okay, in terms of the size that's probably too thick, I'm gonna go down to something smaller, I'm just going to sketch out my little in, You can hang around with me, I'm just gonna start it okay and then just building it up, building it up, pushing harder, pushing not as hard, you can skip on now. And what I'll do is I'll get the editor too um speed this up so it's not as painful. You can watch it in fast forward mode. Alright go okay? All right before you go, I was just like way calm tablets cool because you can kind of move it around at different angles. I'm not finished, I'm not even sure what I'm going to be doing. I'm just drawing now, but I wanted to show you one little tip is like I can draw up and down, like for some reason that line, the arc of my hand, I can do that line really nicely up and down okay? But trying to draw up in this way, it's pretty kind of I find it really difficult so you can either turn your wake on upside down okay and just kind of, I'm just you can't see this, but I'm just moving my weight on upside down so you can kind of change the angle. What's really handy though as well if you're kind of in a fixed deck, so I'm gonna kind of a small desk care. So what you can do is there's this little trick, click and hold down the hand tool. There's a rotate view tool a little bit advanced, but if you click hold and drag it around you can see I can drag this, get into the right position, go back to my brush tool and remember I'm like, I'm a lot better at that kind of motion the down to up the upside down, okay. And I can toggle around again and just kind of work my way around this line, make sure I switch to the brush tool. Haven't changed that kind of permanent rotation. It's just so I can kind of move around when you are finished. Just hit escape on your keyboard, kind of flicks it back around to its original kind of direction and you can keep toggling between those two things. If you're fancy, you can set that up as a shortcut on your wacom tablet. That's kind of out of the scope of this class which I do. Okay, I've got a little dial here on this tablet which and I can set the shortcuts on it using the wakame software that I downloaded from my Mac from the wakame website, you can start matching shortcuts with keys on your welcome tablet. I'm just putting a double line around. Alright, let's speed there's no speeding it up because I'm done because I don't even know what I'm doing, drawing it in with a double line, one thing you might do before you go. I keep adding a little, maybe he's at the end and we've worked on this during layer and it's just normal sitting over the top. What you might find for a bit of realism blending modes. We've used them loads. Multiply in this case is probably gonna work. Okay, start interacting with the background a little bit. Especially here looks like somebody chalked on the wall, terrible drawing embarrassed, look at that. Can I draw better a little bit you guys can't be watching and I need to have like 100 goes at it. Alright, that's the introduction to the wacom tablet and we'll jump into the next video where we look at some more of the special effects with brushes, the smoke stuff and ink splats and that type of thing rather than just hand drawing. Alright. Onto the next video