Coincidental timing as I have been looking at getting a stylus or Wacom tablet for sketching layouts and quick notes while at my desk. My Jot Pro with Penultimate has been a bit average, unfortunately.
At that <$250ish pricepoint, Wacom's main offerings appear to be the Intuos stylus or their non-pro touch surface line. In the case of the former, you're drawing on your iPad and your stylus is hitting the same surface as your "ink". Another benefit is being able to easily sketch on the iPad on the couch or wherever. Issue for me with this one is that it needs Bluetooth 4 and my iPad 2 doesn't cut it.
With the pen and touch line, you're anchored or near your laptop/screen and sketching is detached from the "ink" on screen. But everything drawn is right there where I'll likely want it in Photoshop, etc.
Not sure that this Adobe Slide ruler would be all that useful and the pen would come down to app support and responsiveness. From Adobe's video, it's hard to see what the lag on the pen is like. Ink requires a more recent iPad too.
Anyone got a current solution they're happy with? I'm thinking that I might need to upgrade my iPad at least.
In my personal experience a pure Wacom tablet always beats a tablet + stylus combo. In past 5(?) years since I've bought a Wacom Bamboo, none of the tablets I tried even came close, and I tried most of them, including the ones with a wacom stylus.
The problem all of them have, is that the surface is far to slippery and only the best I've tried came close in precision.
The main downside with a Wacom is that you don't have the display directly underneath the drawing area (but you get used to it very quickly) and that that the area is quite small (I'd at least go with a Intuos now).
I can't really see Adobes new product solving any problems in the tablet + stylus field.
In the end you obviously should try both and decide what suits you best, but I would choose my 5year old $70 Wacom over any tablet+stylus solution any day.
I agree. I've been trying several tablet with styluses so far, but I was always disappointed to the terrible precision/feel of the combination. I decided anything capacitive is not even worth trying.
This is still a capacitive screen, so you cannot rest your hand on the screen, like you would do normally with a true stylus. This is of uttermost importance for pressure control. And hey, you can use a regular ruler, like I normally do on wacom tablets.
I also cringe at the design of the stylus itself. I did try the Galaxy Note for almost 6 months, and decided it wasn't even worth the "Note" in the name. The stylus would lose 5% of the strokes at first (improved with "training"), and did so with an horrible lag, which you notice much more if the tablet is directly on the screen. The stylus was also too small to be comfortable (similar for the Lenovo Tablet 2).
I much prefer the HP or Toshiba styluses, which are much more like a regular Pilot/Micron drawing pen. I don't understand why they keep reinventing the "pen" (I also dislike the regular Intuos/Bamboo pen by the way - too big).
I don't really need "Cintiq" level. I did try the Surface 2, and it was much better than the alternatives, but it was too heavy and battery life too short. Couldn't try the Helix yet, but all in all, wacom-style pens is a must if you care about note-taking.
I'm disappointed by announce of the Surface 3 due to the lower pressure resolution of the stylus, which is a shame because this means much more narrow response customization. Double shame due to the higher-res screen would be really great for drawing. But I will try it as soon as it will be available in a shop nearby.
Sorry for the big rant/summary, but I still couldn't find a "portable tablet" that I could reliably use for note-taking :(. After my experience with capacitive pens, I really don't believe this can be taken seriously for drawing.
Having been using Graphires (now called Intuous Pro?) for better half of past decade, there is no going back once you've tried a screen + stylus combo. Wacom also makes one - the Cintiq, although it was ridiculously expensive until recently.
It may be subjective, but the advantage of drawing directly on screen is tremendous - it truly feels like paper, as opposed of drawing "blind" while looking up at a screen.
I went to the adobe launch event in NYC yesterday and was blown away by the demos and by how simple and intuitive the device is. So far, i'm very pleased with it - lets see what a week of use will bring...
I find that there's a pretty big split between people who really love the Cintiq and its ilk, and people who would vastly prefer to draw on a separate tablet. I'm in the latter camp: the lag is more perceptible when my hand is right there, plus slight inaccuracies in location really throw me off, and the real dealbreaker is that I'm a righty, and my hand is not transparent. Also ergonomics - I don't have to hunch over my "drawing table" any more, I can have the screen at the perfect height to keep my neck happy, and the tablet at just the right place to keep my arm happy.
I mean obviously if you're using this new Adobe tool you're not going to have the "hand obscuring menus" issue, as it's a UI designed for touch - but then again you're also using a simple art tool, rather than a giant toolbox like PS or AI. Which is fine if that simple tool happens to cover all your needs. Not so fine if it doesn't.
I know pros who love their screen tablets, I know pros who have no interest in them despite easily having the cashflow for one.
Oh yes: Graphire was the entry level brand, it's been replaced by Bamboo. Intuos has always been the pro line. The tech has advanced over time, I think a Bamboo today is better than an Intuos of five years ago. The Cintiq tends to use the better quality of digitizers found in the Intuos.
I did try briefly the Cintiq. Did you notice some parallax effect?
After using for years with separate tablet/screen, I cannot say I "dislike" the combination. It allows you to draw upright, which is very comfortable after you get used to it. I've been using drawing desks for years, and I would say it's more comfortable than using a tilted plane.
It's also weird (in a positive way) how you can fully see the effect of the stroke on the screen, which are normally hidden by the hand/pen.
That being said, I definitely prefer "feedback" if I'm writing, for instance, so I can relate to your sentiment even though I couldn't try a cintiq professionally yet.
I use my Wacom Bamboo al day. Have a look at http://www.smudgeguard.com/ This helps for both Wacom users as well as 'on-screen drawing' and even on iPad drawing.
Thanks (and to other respondents as well). I bought an Intuos Pen and Touch last night for about $150 and I'm keen to try that out.
I love sketching layouts and ideas, but tend to put off doing it on paper because then I have loose sheets everywhere or multiple notebooks, or pages that have a combination of sketches and other to-do notes.
Never tried a Wacom before, so very keen to give it a go!
Not a coincidence. Adonit manufactures the Ink & Slide for Adobe, and apart from some cosmetic differences, and an additional button, the JTPP has all the same functionality as the Ink.
It's more then 250 dollars but I love my galaxy note 10.1 2014 edition. Got it refurbished in a groupon buy for about 350 and it works perfectly. The digitizer is wacom and the display is amazing.
I have the 12.2 edition which costs way more than the price range of the OP but it's such a fantastic experience. I use it for everything but coding. I tried a Wacom pad and pen with my desktop but I really disliked it. I much prefer seeing what I write and myself writing it at the same time. My brain didn't like the disconnect of looking at a monitor while drawing on a pad. It made my handwriting much worse.
“When a musician plays, if they have to constantly look through dropdown menus to find the next chord, the music would not be very good. It’s farfetched and maybe not possible, but we’d love for, some day, artists to play Photoshop, to stay in flow, to be expressive without interruption.”
I've been using Illustrator for a decade. I've fiddled with the key commands to make the tools I like to use a quick key press away. I've recorded macros and assigned keystrokes to them (and am currently swearing a lot because a recent update broke some of them). I've written little scripts.
And yeah, all this helps the flow. I work a lot faster then I did when I was first using AI.
I have been thinking about this lately, and want to survey my artist friends to see how many of them have also extensively customized the interface of their favorite art tools. I have an intuition that it's one of the signs of being a pro: you've explored enough of the deep set of tools within a modern art program that you can say "this is an important part of my process" and make it more accessible.
I wish Google put more focus on better supporting highly accurate pens in all Android versions. Right now only Samsung does that, pretty much, and even they have started losing interest a bit, I think, and they've made their latest Note tablets very expensive, too.
I was hoping Nvidia would launch another Tegra Note tablet with its cheap but very accurate stylus, but at 10", and for $300 or less, but it should've arrived by now, and it hasn't.
There's also Qualcomm's Snapdragon 805 processor, which promises "ultrasound inking" [1] of some sort, that seems like a pretty cool technology, but might also be supported only by a few devices, at most. So I think it's ultimately up to Google to make a bigger push for this, but unfortunately I think Google has zero interest in this.
Napoleon wasn't short by most measures. The myth comes from two issues: Napoleon used tall soldiers in his personal guard, and British people said it to make fun of him.
I'll stick with my windows tablet and Sketchbook Pro. It already has compass, ruler, French curve and perspective available with the stylus or my finger. The whole point of an iPad is portability, not add-on gadgets. The software interface looks cool though.
The touch pressure for paper is done with a new touch Radius property. The radius property on touches was available as a private API, but only made available publicly in iOS 8.
The Ink and Adonit touch pixel point, which are basically the same (We manufacture the Ink and Slide for adobe) use a pressure sensitive tip in the pen itself, and communicate that pressure over Bluetooth. This gives you a much higher resolution on the pressure, with the trade off of the BT stack latency.
It's really interesting to me that most of these are just Bluetooth-connected buttons. There's no pressure or angle sensitivity in the FiftyThree Pencil, it's just a button.
I tried to find the "pressure" API in iOS 8, but I just found a new majorRadius field (with an error tolerance). Android supports a bunch of information (including "pressure" and radius) -- I bet you get pretty rich data on devices with dedicated stylus support.
I was able to connect to the Pencil from Android via BTLE and observe the tip being pressed and released (though not the eraser for some reason; maybe I have to write some value out for that characteristic to come alive?) -- maybe later this summer I'll try to make a basic Pencil-compatible Android drawing app :).
In a capacitive touchscreen there really is no way to measure how hard your finger is pressing on the screen. What you can measure is how large of a footprint your meat-finger creates when it smashes down on the glass. The center of the point hasn't changed, but the radius of the circle has.
So you could use the accelerometer independently of the touchscreen for gestures like flicking ink blots or swishing the "brush" in "water" -- or maybe you can do some fancy things on the screen like tapping on the same spot for stippling (using the accelerometer to approximate height and velocity, independent of the final pressure on the tip). There's so much fun stuff to do here!
Definitely, that is what we hope developers will start using it for. We expose the accelerometer data in the SDK, so developers can get access to the data. We also use the relative pen position to the iPad to sort out some offset issues to make sure the line appears to be coming from the tip itself.
I would marginally be considered a "professional artist" and I am salivating about these devices after seeing them in action. For me, the combination of accurate stylus, retina display, and that slider thingy are a dream come true!
Sure, the iPad software that accompanies these programs is pretty wimpy, but I can easily work around these limitations with some post processing. However, every artist's workflow is different, so other people might have more difficulty working around the limitations.
I understand the novelty of drawing on an iPad. But I've tried it many times and it's just not accurate at all. You just have to look at the tip of those pens to understand that. IMO Cintiq is the only way to go if you're serious about "art". On the other side, if you use that kind of things for notes and rapid prototyping, why not.
This one supposedly has a super high accuracy. Did I get it wrong, is this just another capacitive stylus? If so, then I agree it's crap.
Edit: darn, after some research it looks like this pen uses regular capacitance... Unless they solved the accuracy issue that existed with earlier pens, the review I saw must have been misleading... I thought this used a new technology.
The new thing going on is that Apple is letting you detect the size of a touch on the screen, which lets you approximate pressure by how smushed the tip is. Still going to be less accurate than a Wacom or similar stylus, but it's an improvement over being less accurate and not having pressure sensitivity.
This guy managed to do great art in MS Paint[1] but it seems they are making great art despite their tool and probably not going to be a good tool for the mainstream professional.
Well, it's not like Procreate is like MS Paint in this regard. It's an extremely fast and capable painting and compositing engine. And those are just the gallery highlights on their marketing pages.
There are Flickr etc groups with sample images from simple users, and the do quite impressive work. In fact several professional illustrators use it.
I don't really like the feel of using these. I would much rather just tap two points draw a line and drag it where I want it. Why not use an entirely new design to make use of the technology?
When sketching concepts, line weight is created in various ways and used to bring a sketch to life, conveying information such as 3d depth, important areas, material strength, motion, mood, as well as the designer's particular style. I don't think this is intended for CAD and vector drawings.
Adobe said that the Line and Sketch apps are free (as well as photoshop mix), and in Line, there is a "soft ruler" you can use with any stylus or even your finger, minus the touch sensitivity of course.
Architectural drawings and design sketches such as dresses or electronics often have straight lines - but during creation process you just don't think that a side of something is "two dots connecting"
Coincidental timing as I have been looking at getting a stylus or Wacom tablet for sketching layouts and quick notes while at my desk. My Jot Pro with Penultimate has been a bit average, unfortunately.
At that <$250ish pricepoint, Wacom's main offerings appear to be the Intuos stylus or their non-pro touch surface line. In the case of the former, you're drawing on your iPad and your stylus is hitting the same surface as your "ink". Another benefit is being able to easily sketch on the iPad on the couch or wherever. Issue for me with this one is that it needs Bluetooth 4 and my iPad 2 doesn't cut it.
With the pen and touch line, you're anchored or near your laptop/screen and sketching is detached from the "ink" on screen. But everything drawn is right there where I'll likely want it in Photoshop, etc.
Not sure that this Adobe Slide ruler would be all that useful and the pen would come down to app support and responsiveness. From Adobe's video, it's hard to see what the lag on the pen is like. Ink requires a more recent iPad too.
Anyone got a current solution they're happy with? I'm thinking that I might need to upgrade my iPad at least.