Hello y’all,

As I work on ramping everything up and getting better at all of this, I got a new toy. My first Wacom tablet. It is an Intous3 4×6. Pretty nice. Having never used a tablet before, I find that it was incredibley easy to use it for photo editing. I still need to work a bit on my drawing skills.

So I’ll give you a rundown of what I think.

First off, the packaging was done really well. Unboxing it was simple enough, and everything was pretty well organized inside of the box.

Installing the tablet was a snap. Put the disk into the machine, connected the tablet, and it did the rest. Didn’t have a single issue.

99% of my work is done in Photoshop, so being my eager self I went straight into using it. As  I used it to navigate I found that holding the pen tip right against the pad didn’t work very well. I started to hover the pen over the pad and that worked much better. As much as I thought it would be weird having my monitors mapped to a single pad like this, it actually became fairly easy to use. As with any new navigation/pointer device there is a certain learning curve, but I found the switch to the tablet easy.

Having never used a pressure sensitive device before, I was clueless as to what the possibilities were. I found myself unable to figure out how to get the brushes to work with the sensitivity. Then I discovered the brush menu. Lots of options I never knew existed. After playing around in there I started to get the hang of the pressure thing. For me, using pressure to define width and opacity is really nice. After a little bit I was able to do some masking for light painting that would have taken much much longer, with lots of slowly building it, to an image.

On the customization side of the tablet, it was fairly easy. Most of the stock settings worked fine for me. As I work on a dual monitor setup (never going back to single) I found the ability to map it to the monitors based off of what was connected very useful. I mapped it to cover both monitors for general usage, but only the main monitor (20.1″ widescreen) inside of Photoshop.  Once again, this was really painless, and helped a ton.

Overall, if you do lots of digital editing, and you aren’t using a tablet, well, you are just insane. After only a few hours I can tell this is going to greatly improve both my work and workflow.

Overall I am extremely happy with the tablet. I was amazed