Using a Digitizing Tablet With Photoshop

Video Transcript

"Adobe Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated. I am in no way affiliated with Adobe. Hi, I'm Steve Anthony. I'm a photographer and digital retouching artist here in New York City. In this clip we're going to talk about using a digitizing tablet for working in Photoshop. Now you can certainly use your computer and mouse and millions of people do that everyday. But if you want to get - have some really, really fine level control over your image manipulation in Photoshop you really need to have some sort of a digitizing tablet. In this case all it is is a - it's a tablet and a pen which functions as an editing tool. I'll show you what I mean. Now if I were to take this picture and I wanted to, I don't know, for example, draw a mustache on it. Well I could do that with my mouse, if I really had to, I'd make a pretty bad mess with it, but if I were using a digitizing tablet it really is just like drawing with a pen on a piece of paper. Now this is perhaps not the best example of what I'm talking about. So let me show you just a blank image. And what you can do with a - now if I were to write my name with the mouse, it can be done, but as you can see it's quite tedious and cumbersome. Whoops. And it's very easy to make a serious mistake like that, whereas again, with a tablet it's just like I'm drawing on a piece of paper. And it's also pressure sensitive so as you increase the pressure it gets to be like - like you're using any other artist's tool. And you can - just by using - if you use the right brush simply the pressure of your pen changes the thickness and the attributes of the brush. If I don't use much pressure it's a fairly thin line, if I press down hard it's a very thick line. Now this, you know obviously I'm just doodling, this is not really showing you how to make best use of a tablet but if you were to be editing a picture for example, being able to have a very fine adjustment for doing things like, for example, dodging. It's good to have a very, very light touch, now in this case I'm doing a rather odd effect just so you can see what I'm doing. Lightening the area under the glasses, but you can see I can have a very, very fine control as opposed to the rather cumbersome control of the mouse. They're inexpensive, I highly recommend if you're going to spend any time at all with Photoshop, get yourself a digitizing tablet, and I think you'll find it'll open up a world of new and exciting possibilities in Photoshop. I'm Steve Anthony and this has been how to use a digitizing tablet with Photoshop."