wacom tablet + CS4 + No pressure sensitivity

Frank - that still sounds like you have a buggy driver.

Photoshop doesn't care what you start with, we constantly monitor the state of the input device to see if it supports pressure or not.

Alright folks i hope some of you find this helpful, as the process of figuring this out for /me/ has been frustrating. Firstly i'm very new to the tablet world so i purchased a great "entry level" tablet. "Mousepen 8x6 Genius" tablet which for $58 @ Amazon.com it's a great price for a beginner!

My workstation: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU, 2GB RAM, Windows Vista 32bit, nVidia 8800GT 512MB, Mousepen 8x6 Genius tablet. All the latest OS updates and device drivers installed.

So what i was experiencing was the same many others were in this thread, from pressure sensitivity coming and going (if on at all), weird things like trying to make a curve and i get just a strait line, getting caution triangles when trying to adjust brush properties, etc... Well as someone else pointed out breifly if you start up CS4 w/ your mouse it apparently doesn't recognize all your tablet and pens capabilities (or at least pressure sensitivity capability. You can still draw with it though). This is exactly the root cause of the issue. However i experimented and took it one step further, after launching CS4 w/ your tablets pen, if you move your mouse at ANY time, CS4 frustratingly demonstrates the above mentioned issues (including the odd "appearing\dissappearing" of the caution triangles in the brush properties). Knowing this i did an experiment where i moved my mouse somewhere it couldn't be moved and started up CS4. I've used my tablet for several hours worth of drawing now and both it and CS4 have performed flawlessly.

So i did further testing and used a great open source application "The GIMP 2.6" as a metric for comparison. As of this message i've experienced absolutely NO issues EVER in The GIMP. Pressure sensitivity has worked perfectly. The best part is how they appear to handle the 'ol "i'm gonna move my mouse" deal. Apparently if you start a drawing w/ your mouse no worries. However once you start using your tablet and pen for drawing it appears to "lock" it so your mouse can no longer draw. Now some might say, "Oh no! That sucks" well not really! Your mouse is still fully functional in the rest of the application, you simply have to use your tablet for drawing, which is why you purchased it anyways right? The upside is no weird "anomolies" present themselves through the normal product usage. Pressure sensitivity with the tablet is never compromised nor do any weird things like making an arc and getting a strait line happen (Because CS4 appears to just not know what to do with what it "thought" was a mouse).

So moral of the story, start CS4 w/ your tablet and pen and DO NOT!!!! move your mouse for ANY reason unless you feel like restarting CS4. This is a huge issue for me as i usually do several things even while drawing. It seems like such a simple fix, i mean if Photoshop is having issues "remembering" the settings for a device, that would imply it knows them at some point and can identify that single device and associate those settings with it no? Why not then SAVE them even in memory, then when i draw with the mouse it can say, "Oh he's using the mouse, load those settings!" Then when i go back to my stylus, "Oh he's using the stylus load those fantastic pressure sensitivity settings" seems rather intuitive and quite possibly incredibly simple to me. Plus it would be completely transparent to the user which is always great when things magically "just work."

So, sorry for the long post, but it's meant to be a word of caution for users, and a word of help to the apparent moderators or Adobe folks who appear to be on these boards. I hope this trickles through to the right people as it's truly such a simple issue yet it's causing MANY headaches. Not worth tarnishing such a great products name.

Hope it helps,
Frank L. Morales II

> A clean installation is absurd, does not have logical sense
, nobody can format and install for problems as this one, an explanation must exist for this.

Well!, that's what FIXED the issue. It could have been a windows update, driver or reg conflict, who knows!....but it's fixed now. For me, that was the path of least resistance - it may help someone else.

don't make me take a plonk out on you buko! :)

>and you can call me dave...

OK Milly. B)

> milbut, I have already emailed a few days ago. I have not received anything. I fear we may never get the update as the last driver was of mid-2007.

bummer. wish i could give you better advice. wacom has always been very responsive to users.

and you can call me dave... :)

I just installed new wacom drivers (610-5) over my old ones, and now photoshop cs4 x64 recognizes pen pressure. Before that, only ps cs4 x32bit recognized pen pressure from tablet pen, ps cs4 x64 did not worked well with pen pressure. Now everything works fine. My os is windows xp pro x64bit, and all I did was installing new wacom drivers

I think I have the problem solved. I loaded the new wacom driver but it didn't uninstall the older driver. Contacted Wacom and the tech support emailed me within the same day, (just hours actually) and told me to uninstall through the control panel 'remove programs,' the wacom program (the MS mouse drivers still allow you to navigate). [note, he warned not to uninstall through device manager]. I unchecked the open gl box in PS, closed PS, then installed the new drivers and all was fine except for one thing.

When in PS, I opened the wacom control panel to adjust the speed of the mouse and the real estate on the tablet. When I went back into PS the mouse didn't work with the tools. I tried the pen and that worked, went back to the mouse and now that worked. I duplicated the trip (from PS to wacom control and back) a few times with the same results. Now, if I just open PS and begin working without going to the wacom panel for adjustment, all is well. I noted this for the tech guy and he said "Photoshop does have issues when moving back and forth between the pen and the mouse.When you load Photoshop with the pen it then loads all of the pressure sensitive options for the program, it you then switch to the mouse it doesn't know what to do with all of those items that it
loaded."

BTW, I have no problems with the sensitivity and all the open gl functions work fine. Thanks for the replies here.

well, i will send an e-mail to Genius now to know wath can i do, I know Genius is not like Wacom, but on CS3 I never has a problem.

A clean installation is absurd, does not have logical sense
, nobody can format and install for problems as this one, an explanation must exist for this.

And this, I say it with knowledge, since I am expert in computer system, could be a solution, but not always!

sorry for my english again.

bye

milbut, I have already emailed a few days ago. I have not received anything. I fear we may never get the update as the last driver was of mid-2007.