Wacom Intuos3 6x8 Tablet


One of the really cool things that attracted my attention was that there is an auto-lipsync feature so if you are writing a cartoon you could create the mouth in various positions, record your audio track, and then the software will lip sync the face up using the individual mouth positions you drew.

Recently I purchased a Wacom Intuos3 6x8 tablet with the goal being to use it to edit some photographs with Photoshop a bit more than I've done in the past. Of course since I'm still waiting on the iMac G5 to ship I hooked it up to the G4 iMac and have been playing a bit.

I got a nice book called 'Photoshop CS for Digital Photographers' and have been finding photos that were borked in some way so that I could edit them a bit and have been using the pen interface on the tablet to try. It is taking some getting used to because quite honestly I have not used a pen and paper in some time.

I've been trying to fix a few shots where say the camera was in portrait orientation and the before I got my flash bracket it would of course mean the flash fired from the left side, lighting the shot really weird. There were a couple of really good shots that were hosed up by this and I've been since trying to figure out ways to correct it.

I think I've found the right tools in Photoshop to do it, just can't seem to get it evened out. We'll see.

But since I now have a tablet I've been playing around looking for various other things to do with it and I've stumbled across a few things.

First there is Alias Sketchbook Pro which had is a really cool sketching program with lots of little brush/pen/pencil types of things and a really nice interface. While I can't see myself buying this software any time soon because after about an hour of playing with it I realized that yes, I still can't draw.

Next on the list is some software I recently read a review on in MacWorld called ToonBoom Studio and ToonBoom Studio Express. One of the really cool things that attracted my attention was that there is an auto-lipsync feature so if you are writing a cartoon you could create the mouth in various positions, record your audio track, and then the software will lip sync the face up using the individual mouth positions you drew. That's pretty dang cool. of course, 30 min with the demo and I'm reminded that yes, I can't draw.

Also I discovered after hooking up the tablet where all the work on the newton went. I was messing around with the pen trying to play with it when something popped up about how I'd attempted to turn on ink but it wasn't enabled. A new control panel has appeared in my system preferences called 'Ink'. I turned it on and next thing I know there is full character recognition turned on and I can now hand write my emails onto the tablet.

It works as well as the newton did for me, since my handwriting is a bit messy. Here we go a quick example:

Gr ccHys Programs .1

Which should have been 'Greetings Programs!'

not too bad, and it's kind of cool. The thing throws up a yellow notepad as you write with lines and everything. I've not quite got the hang of it but you know if Apple ever came out with a tablet computer their OS is ready for it which was a bit of a shock to me.

Also I can do some random gesture based commands for cut/paste, insert, etc. Rather cool. I'm too used to Graffiti to write though and find myself using their methods to try and write. Pretty odd how little I write with a pen these days.

Posted: Sat - September 25, 2004 at 01:13 PM           |

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