Wacom Question - Anyone familiar with tablets?

[Sean Dempsey]

I've got a Wacom Intus 9z12 tablet, and I use it in Photoshop CS.

My machine is a 2.8ghz p4, 2 gigs of 400mhz ram, with my files running off a Serial ATA hd, and my scratch disk on a seperate 7200 rpm IDE drive. The files are usually 300dpi and about 10x12 inches.. but typically I am zoomed in so only a small portion is showing.

When using the tablet, say to do a brush technique, I'll have it set to a small size, and have the opacity set to pen pressure. When I do this, the brush still "lags" and won't update the image in real time, its about half a second behind. This makes it pretty difficult to do detail work when my brush is dragging behind my pen.

Is there anyone who knows things about wacoms and photoshop and how I can get them to work faster, aside from hardware upgrades?

[Sebastian]

How do you have spacing set in the brush preference? By default there is a 25% spacing that can make it look like it's skipping.

If you really do mean LAG, as in the stroke is smooth and the brush can't keep up, it's possibly due to the resolution you're running your screen at. The higher the res, the slower it will be. Remember that those fancy 3D accelerators do very little for 2D.

[Sean Dempsey]

Spacing is always set to 0%

It looks like this: you move the stylus along, the "brush" in CS follows about a quater inch behind, and when you release the styus, the stroke sorta "pops" into place and the cursor turns to an hourglass.

I have 2 19 inch screens running off the VGA and DVI (with an adapter) off of my Geforce 4 ti4200... its not the best card.

[mjm]

sounds like you have a smoking system. the graphic designer in my office uses a tablet on about 1/2 the system you have without problems. i will see if he has any suggestions for making it run better.

[mjm]

From Rich

"win2k or XP?

what else is he running on his USB bus

is it a new model? is it set for pen mode and not mouse?"

[Sean Dempsey]

"win2k or XP?

what else is he running on his USB bus

is it a new model? is it set for pen mode and not mouse?"

Windows XP pro, fully updated

USB devices... Mouse, Wacom, 8-in-1 card reader, scanner, printer, palm cradle.

I got the tabley about... 3 years ago or more, I'd say it's probalby 3.5 years old. It's an Intuos 1.

The drivers are the newest drivers for the Intuos 1.

also, it is set for pen mode, mapped to the 1st monitor only, for a 1:1 tracking ratio. (the stylus won't go over to the 2nd monitor, the wacom is mapped 100% only to 1 monitor, not both)