Entry Level Pen Tablets: Making the Artist's PC-Life Easier

Photo Ops

A useful application of tablets is found in photo pop-outs. The method of this action is removing a part or parts of a photo and implementing them in another photo to create a completely new scene. A photo pop-out can be done without a tablet by using your regular mouse to erase a copied background in Photoshop, and then drag to a new photo. However, using the Graphire3 made the whole process quicker, easier, and more attractive. The main down-side of using a mouse is that the erasing process isn't pressure sensitive, so hugging the edges of the picture being cut out is very difficult. Erasing background and fitting pieces of the picture together were simple with the Graphire3 pen. The eraser is pressure sensitive, just like the tip, making the procedure more precise with fewer mess-ups. Using this technique makes for an easy time of displaying the often unnoticed extra cast member of the original Star Trek series: our fearless leader, Anand.

Attempting to use similar techniques with the Hyperpen 8000U proved close to futile. After realizing that the jerking of the Aiptek mouse would not relent, the regular, non-tablet mouse and pad was required to finish the job of depicting Anand with his good buddy Bill Gates.

Truthfully, you shouldn't even attempt this process with the Hyperpen 8000U, unless you have the patience of a rock.

In comparing the Graphire3 pen to the mouse, it should be mentioned that the pop-out time span (the amount of time spent erasing around Anand's head in the original photo) was cut by about a third when using the pen instead of the mouse. Also, to get the right edges when using a mouse, a continuous clicking method was the only way to be sure to keep the lines looking natural so as to make the new photo look less computer-generated. Many errors causing multiple trips to the Photoshop history menu dragged out the time of this task and made it more tedious. The tablet pen works better mostly because you can make larger eraser marks for big spaces and smaller eraser marks for tiny spaces without having to visit the control bar to change dimensions. Wacom's Graphire3 didn't even require using the eraser tool from the side bar — you could just flip the pen over.

The Hyperpen 12000U was more usable than the 8000U in this activity, though still not quite up to par with the Graphire3. The slight dragging of the mouse doesn't have an effect on the pen so much; consequently, the invested time and effort was a bit more rewarding. Here, we can see Anand hanging out with rapper, Snoop Dogg.

If a recommendation had to be made based solely on photography manipulation, once again, the Graphire3 drawing tablet would receive the highest praise. The Graphire3 seems to take every detail of artistic computer interfacing into account, making it much more versatile.