[Cleoric]

I borrowed my brothers PenPartner ( ) today. Installed it, all fine and dandy.

But it jumps around like a bugger and seems to... well, I guess it doesn't have a very high "refresh rate" (best way I could describe it?) or something, it sorta, stops, then picks up again later and in and out, stuff like that.

So I was wondering, how much would I notice a difference if I got the Intuos? Would it be much better? MUCH better? MUCH MUCH better? Or just slightly? Etc.

Example:

This is a small little doodle.


This is me placing it under the plastic mat thingy and trying to trace it:



And then just a random doodle Like ummm, 20 seconds. Shoosh. Didn't say I was good to begin with.



PS: How do I change what the pressure settings do? Like, does it always have to make the lines bigger or smaller? Could it be so that it changes the opacity? Or nothing at all? For PS7 And Painter7

[Jin]

Hi,

Here's a partial answer to your questions. Others will probably be able to fill in the rest.

Can't tell you anything about Pen Partner, but both my old ArtZ II and new Intuos 2 interact with the brush controls in Painter 7 (don't own Photoshop 7). The Brush Controls palette includes several sections, each of which contain sliders and check boxes to adjust various brush variants or to set up custom brush variants. For instance, in the Brush Controls palette's Expression section, the following controls ...

None
Velocity
Direction
Pressure
Wheel
Tilt
Bearing
Source
Random

... can be applied to each of the following (depending on the brush variant, some may be greyed out):

Size
Jitter
Opacity
Grain
Color
Angle
Resat
Bleed
Flow
Feature
Depth
Volume
Rank 1
Rank 2
Rank 3

The Direction slider ranges from 0 degrees to 360 degrees.

The full list of Brush Controls palette sections is:

General
Size
Spacing
Angle
Bristle
Impasto
Expression
Well
Airbrush
Rake
Random
Water
Cloning
Mouse
Liquid Ink

Here's a small sampling done with the Pens' Smooth Ink Pen and controls adjusted for Size and Opacity:

[Asurfael]

if you don't want the size to change, just uncheck the "size dynamics" in the brushes menu of photoshop 7. Also if you choose the size dynamics, you get to the size dynamics menu, where you can change how much would the size vary.

for opacity changes, go to the brushes menu and check "other dynamics". Also by choosing that you can choose how much will it affect. I'd recommend playing around with the options in the brush menu for a while (it's in the upper right corner, I think you've noticed it). that's the best way to figure out what you want to do and how to do it. Once you've meddled with the settings for a bit you can get some really neat stuff done

[Cleoric]

Ok, that is very helpful, thanks so much both of you

But I'd still like to know, with the jumpiness and overall unsatisfactory quality of the PenPartner, are the "real" ones quite a lot better?

[Asurfael]

well i wouldn't know since the worst tablet i've used was a graphire, and it wasn't the least bit jumpy on my computer. but as far as i've heard, you should have at least a graphire for satisfactory quality. some people recommend the artz series too, but it's old so i guess it would be hard to find (and not worth the trouble as graphire2's are extremely cheap nowadays)

[Angelic Devil]

I don't think an intuos (spelling?) is worth the money. It's quite expensive and the graphire isn't bad. I've had very good drawings done on it. The intuos is just larger, which I don't see the need for. I say just get a graphire. It's very handy.... and cheap ^^

[B3AND1P]

I don't know if this is your problem, but it reminds me of something I used to deal with a lot. I have a dual monitor setup, and I was noticing a lot of jittering and jumping coming from my tablet sometimes (I have a wacom intous 6x8). It turns out that the tablet was recieving noise from my left monitor. I have since moved the montor away from the tablet and everything is cool now. Hope that helps.

[jester1966]

I do not know whether you have the configuration option - but try to disable the "double click" feature. It helped against the jumpiness of my intuos (A6 size)

Jester1966