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Why You Should Use a Tablet

Lesson 10 from: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

Why You Should Use a Tablet

Lesson 10 from: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

10. Why You Should Use a Tablet

Mark explains why a tablet is an essential tool when working in Photoshop.

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

00:52
2

Introducing Photoshop

02:37
3

The Class Materials

01:36
4

How To Open Files

01:42
5

Using The Home Screen

02:35
6

Exploring The Interface

03:30
7

Getting Additional Help

01:36
8

Understanding Workspaces

05:11

Lesson Info

Why You Should Use a Tablet

Let's talk about this tablet. I'm using a welcome into Pro tablet. I've had different versions of welcome tablets over the years. This is a medium tablet. If you're doing a lot of retouching in Photoshop, I highly recommend using a tablet. In fact, I think it's an essential part of the tools that you should have. Let me show you why. So in Photoshop we have up here this little option to turn on and off the tablet for controlling our tool. Now I've selected a simple paintbrush and it does exactly what you think it paints on and off. And so I'm going to use the mouse at first. So if I paint with the mouse, no matter what I do, it's always the exact same size. If I want to change any of that, I have to come up to my options bar and I have to tell the tool to be either a smaller brush or I can tell it to be a larger brush or I can tell it to be really soft, whatever. So um all of that stuff is in the menu in the options bar of this tool. Now there are keyboard shortcuts that allow me to ch...

ange that. So the left bracket takes the size of the tool down the right bracket makes it larger so I can do a little bit of that, but watch what happens when I use the tablet instead. So I'm going to undo all of this stuff. So later I'll show you how to undo all of those things. I'm going to use this pen now, the first thing that's really nice about a tablet is that you can customize the tablet. So on the left hand side of the tablet there are all these different little buttons here and so I can for example I've programmed one to be the hand tools so I just pushed that and it's the hand tool. I have this little thing here, I can go through and change the brush size with this little scrolling thing right on the tablet, I can rotate my image so it makes it a little bit easier to to retouch that I can go back here. I can take the rotation back to normal. Um so all of those things are built in so I don't have to use the keyboard quite so much. And so I'm going to go back here to brush size and then I will select a paintbrush once again now watch what happens. This tablet allows me to not only detect the pressure of the pen but the angle of the pen and then the pen has two different sides. So I can have a tool that maybe it's an eraser on one side and the brush on the other side. And so depending on the tool that you select, you can program the pen and the tablet to behave differently. And so you can really save a lot of time now watch what happens. So I'm gonna make my brush really large but using the pressure of the pen I can very, very softly just touch this and I can make a really small line or I can push really hard and make a really big line and so I can do different things. So instead of having to go back and forth between the keyboard and different shortcuts and having to make things different, I can just do that like you would with a pen or a pencil and change things. The other thing that's really impressive about this is if you really need to do some fine detail work. So maybe let's see, I'm gonna go way in here to want his face and with the mouse, let's say I want to outline her eyes. So I'm gonna get a brush. So with the pen I would have to go in here, I mean with the mouse I would have to go in here and then make this a small tool and then try to with the mouse brush around this and it's not so good or with the pen you can do this just like you would with an actual pen. So I can go in there and be really precise depending on how steady your hand is that I can go in and do something very, very precise. And so when you're retouching things and trying to remove blemishes or get like a single hair off the face, you can really easily do that with the pen. But with the mouse it's not so easy and you'll see as we go forward that I'll be using my tablet more and more and more so throughout this entire class, I'm going to be using a combination of the tablet and pen and my keyboard and mouse. And you'll see how my workflow uses the tablet quite heavily and the mouse and the keyboard just when I need to do keyboard shortcuts or just menu items and things. So I use both simultaneously. But I highly recommend getting a tablet. It's gonna save you a ton of time.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Workbook
Class Materials

Ratings and Reviews

Katie
 

Mark did a great job at explaining things and going over them multiple times throughout the lessons. My only issue was that sometimes it went a little faster than I could keep up and I needed to rewind it a bit and start again. But from someone who has never worked in photoshop before I 100% recommend this class to anyone trying to learn.

Terri Schwartz
 

Student Work

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