
Those aspects of pen and tablet are great for exerting precision strokes, but (I believe) are unnecessary for the average photographer. That can seem like a lot of wasted movement for folks accustomed to nudging their mouse an inch to reach the far end of the screen. In some cases this means you have to move your whole arm to get your cursor/pointer/tool from one corner of the display to another.

Also, a tablet has a fairly large active area (the surface that’s sensitive to the touch of the pen). This means the pen has pressure sensitivity to regulate how hard you need to press to paint, draw or click. The reason is that it is truly designed for extreme control. It also has better pressure sensitivity for when that may be needed.Ī lot of folks find their first few attempts at working with the tablet to be somewhat frustrating.
Best art tablets 2016 pro#
I prefer the Intuos Pro (Medium) for the extra size of the tablet for resting my wrist. Wacom’s most popular are the Intuos and the Intuos Pro lines. Many models and varieties of tablets are available at different price points. They just find it all-around more comfortable. That being said, I know plenty of photographers who use the pen and tablet the whole time they are editing. Basically I use it anytime I imagine that a pen would be a more efficient tool than a brick … I mean, a mouse. I also use the tablet extensively when I’m working on creating masks for local adjustments in both Lightroom and Photoshop. But the moment I need to perform serious spot removal, I plug in the Wacom and revel in its ease of use. For basic image editing (moving the sliders about), I generally don’t use one, as I am fairly comfortable with the mouse and trackpad for those tasks. That’s one prime example of when a tablet makes my life easier. Instead of fussing around from hot pixel to hot pixel with a mouse, trying to microadjust the position of the pointer, trying and missing and undoing and redoing ad nauseam, I was able to just pinpoint each spot with my tablet pen. Using the Wacom tablet and pen made my job much easier. In this example, the long exposure noise hadn’t completely ruined the image, but I definitely had to do a lot of spot removal to salvage the shot. This is a phenomenon that I first heard about from Lance Keimig: In dry, desert-like environments, long exposure noise becomes visible at shorter exposures than usual at the same ambient temperature.)
Best art tablets 2016 series#
(The temperature had been fairly cool when I made the shot, so I didn’t turn on long exposure noise reduction for the series of 3-minute exposures. I’d been shooting on one of those nights when long-exposure noise was creeping into images. When I was recently working on a Death Valley image that needed a lot of spot removal, I was reminded of the convenience of my Wacom. But the natural feel of the pen does reduce hand strain and does make many of our tasks much easier. When to Use a Graphic Tabletįor most of our processes in night photography (or photography in general), we don’t need the extreme level of control some of these tablets offer. Imagine how difficult/impossible it would be to draw a realistic scene with a clumsy mouse. These devices are very popular with graphic designers who need to “draw” and “paint” on the computer.

Instead of working with an unergonomic mouse, you can use the more natural and ergonomic pen and tablet to click your clicks, dab at spots and draw your masks. At the most basic level, the pen and tablet are used as a substitute for the relatively unwieldy mouse or track pad.
