Photoshop becomes a Painting Studio with this wonderful peripheral!

Author's Rating:

Pros: Compact, easy to use, intuitive, increases productivity.

Cons: Weak software package.

The Bottom Line: 
An inexpensive and powerful tool for the studio artist crossing into the digital realm. Be careful- you'll soon be wanting a bigger one!

Author's Review
I recently got tired of trying to draw with my mouse.Its not an impossible task, but its also a less than precise way of imaging! After a bit of browsing online, I decided to try out an Intuos 3 tablet from Wacom. I was delighted to find that Wacom was offering refurbished ones on their website, and purchased mine for a price considerably lower than list!
After installing the software, doing a brief online upgrade, and plugging my tablet into my vintage tray loading iMac (upgraded with a Sonnet Technologies processing chip to 600
mhz.) I launched Photoshop and picked up one of my favorite brush presets. After a brief adjustment to the Wacom default setting for my stylus, I was delighted to find that I could draw as easily on my aging iMac as I can by hand on paper. The pressure sensitivity settings on the stylus allow me to create different levels of tone by pressing harder or softer on the tool, and tilt sensitivity allows me to vary the angle of the tip. Brilliant.
I already knew that Photoshop has some great drawing and painting functions, but without the discomfort and imprecision of the mouse holding me back, its almost like having a completely new computer!
I thought that with my slow processor, and ancient video card that there might be a bit of lag between my pen strokes and the screen image, but except when using very large (broad) strokes this is not the case. The stylus tracks fast and well.
Although I was impressed with how many new functions become available in Photoshop CS with a stylus and tablet, the real surprise came when I launched a program I've had for awhile but always found un-useful. With the Intuos 3, Corel Painter IX affords me a freedom and intuitive level of control that I never expected to have in a painting program, including the ability to move and rotate my canvas as easily on the screen as a piece of paper on my drawing table. Sometimes while sketching or painting in Painter IX, the computer disappears, and it feels as if I'm working directly in natural media. I'm beginning to see how an artist used to working with traditional materials can decide to cross over to working entirely in a digital frame!
The Wacom Intuos 3 comes with a decent mouse, but if I have any complaint about the product it is that the mouse is restricted to movement on the tablet for tracking, and its easy to forget and drift off into uncontrollable areas- takes some getting used to! So what I've tended to do is leave my old Mac mouse hooked up, and now I drift between the two mice and the stylus (which can also serve as a mouse!) The Wacom mouse has a flywheel, which allows me to navigate websites more efficiently than the one-button Mac mouse.
The Intuos 3 comes bundled with some useful, if basic, software. Corel Painter Essentials 3 has some nifty presets, but is not nearly as versatile as the full-fuction Painter software. Photoshop Elements is in the same catagory- great for a beginner, but I've been working in Photoshop CS for a long time and that means Elements is one of those disks which I'll probably pass on to a customer or a relative. There is a Photoshop plug-in which includes some interesting tools, but it also places a palette on the desktop which remains visible, even if I'm running Photoshop in the background! So I've pretty much disabled the plug-in.
Overall, the Intuos 3 is a beautifully designed tool, which has allowed me to expand my digital imaging processes and improved my productivity by tenfold! Thanks to Wacom for developing such a brilliant product.