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Photoshop 4 Beginners - Brush Up Your Photoshop Skills - part 6 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

by Mike McNamee Published

The tablet itself is an Intuos 4 which we tested a year ago and were very impressed with. The device communicates over distances of up to 10 metres - we tested it from the far side of the office, as far as you would want to go, as we could no longer see the pointer on the screen! The tablet was not as responsive on wireless as when hardwired although we would judge the delay to be acceptable for everyday graphics use, certainly worth the value of losing the trailing wires! The battery itself is potentially a source of problems. The manual states that if you leave the tablet turned on and over discharge the battery (longer than a week) then it is not possible to recover the battery by charging (replacement costs quoted at around £30). We can see this happening quite regularly as not remembering to turn the thing off is highly likely to occur in a normal office environment. It does go to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity so it should not have been beyond the wit of the engineers to fix the thing up with a failsafe device; we assume that it is the Bluetooth device that is nibbling away at the storage capacity. Despite this we found no bitching on the forums about the matter and some users reported 22 hours of usage between charges. The claimed life is 18 hours with intermittent use.

The Intuos 4 Wireless is available in one size (medium), has an asymmetrical design that puts the Touch Ring and the customisable ExpressKeys on one side of the tablet, making them all available to the user's non-dominant hand. The ExpressKeys help to improve workflow and boost productivity by placing commonly-used commands right at the user's fingertips. Illuminated (OLED) displays provide helpful reminders as to the function of each ExpressKey. Settings on the Touch Ring are scrolled by tapping the centre button to provide scrolling/ zooming, navigating through layers, changing brush size or canvas rotation. The pens have a 2,048 step sensitivity and are more responsive than previous versions. The pens available are the standard, Art Pen and Airbrush and cost between £90 and £100. The Airbrush has a scroll wheel for controlling ink flow, the Art Pen is rotation sensitive.

In Use

For a first-time user, the use of a graphics pen is a revelation and few people will go back to a mouse once they have overcome the initial learning slope of using the pen. The exception to this are typists and spreadsheet users (thus including journalists) who very soon tire of letting go of the pen in order to type words or enter data. Even so, almost all users will go back to the graphics pen just as soon as any retouching or masking is called for.

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1st Published
last update 09/12/2022 14:57:48

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