by Joel Howe
18-May-2009
First off, I love Photoshop, and CS4 is no exception. Lots of great new features, big performance improvements, and the 3D features in the Extended edition are right up my alley, work wise. Now I don’t get to do that much painting in Photoshop, and I have always been a tad wary of using my Wacom tablet for drawing. For whatever reason, I just never felt like I had the control that I did with a pencil and paper. Well that has all changed with CS4 and the introduction of the Rotate View tool!
OK, I agree that this feature is not rocket science (like Content Aware Scaling) and it certainly isn’t revolutionary, but it fundamentally changes how I interact with Photoshop in terms of drawing. I loved brushes, I loved the ability to zoom in for detail and use layers to my advantage, but drawing on a tablet just wasn’t intuitive unt
il now. Being able to spin the canvas around like a sheet of paper on the table is transformative. Here are some suggestions for getting the best experience:
- Make sure you have a good graphics card with up to date drivers. That hardware acceleration is what makes this responsive and I can hear my GPU fan spin up every time I rotate the canvas.
- Update your tablet drivers to make sure they are CS4-friendly. If you are using Wacom drivers, turn off that silly “Hover Click” option that listens for a pen hold on the tablet as a right click.
- Clear off the desktop and put the keyboard on the other side of the drawing tablet. Your drawing hand should be on the tablet and your other hand on the keyboard using hotkeys. For those who use PS every day, this is obvious, but you would be surprised how many people don’t do this!
Speaking of hotkeys, here are the bare minimums that you should know, even if you don’t use Photoshop every day:
- B - Brush
- E - Eraser, and much quicker than physically flipping the pen
- [ and ] - Brush resizing
- Space Bar - Hand tool to pan the canvas (try “flicking” the canvas, again new in CS4)
- R - Rotate View of course
So that’s it. One of the least sexy features is also one of the most useful and impressive. If you have never felt “right” drawing directly in Photoshop, consider taking another look at Photoshop CS4!
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