October 2005 — Educator's Evaluation

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Taking Control of Your Digital Imaging Content

Move the mouse around the tablet’s work area and the cursor follows the mouse movement. You can pick up the mouse, move it, and continue scrolling just like any other mouse. However, with the pen, each point on the work area is mapped to a specific spot on the screen.Combine this with any drawing application and you can use the pen to draw just as naturally as you would with a pen and paper. In addition to movement, the pen is pressure-sensitive, so you can easily control line width while drawing.

I must admit that the pen took a little practice, but after a few days, I had no problems using it with the lowly Microsoft Paint or the powerful Adobe Photoshop program. I actually found that the pen gave me much more control, and now I cannot imagine having to go back to a mouse for drawing or photo editing ever again.

To help you use the pen for drawing, the package includes a copy of Corel Painter Essentials 2.For digital photograph editing, it comes with a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0. There is also a copy of nik Color Efex Pro 2.0 for filtering photographs.

If you work with graphics,and especially if you draw on the computer, you will find the Wacom Graphire3 incredibly useful. The average price online is about $165, but you can find it for as low as $150.

Harnessing the Power of Photoshop CS
If you are working with digital images for fun, you are probably better off using the free program that comes bundled with your digital camera or an inexpensive program like Adobe Photoshop Elements (MSRP $99). However, if you are serious about your images, you will find that Adobe Photoshop CS (www.adobe.com) is well worth its higher price and tougher learning curve.

Photoshop CS is a major upgrade to Photoshop; although, it will not look like it when you first start the program because the opening screen and user interface are virtually unchanged. The biggest improvement to the program is a complete overhaul of Photoshop’s ability to work with 16-bit colors. Photoshop CS now works with 16-bit images almost as well as it works with 8-bit images; however, most of the filters and a few other features still do not support its 16-bit mode. A major related improvement is the “Camera Raw” plug-in that allows the program to work with raw data files from high-end digital cameras.

Photoshop can now match colors so photographs shot under different lighting can be color-matched, while another feature allows you to pull in lots of details from areas of your photographs that ended up being too bright or too dark. Another new feature that users have waited a long time for enables you to add text to an image that follows shapes and even free-form paths. The program’s ability to work with layers in your photograph has also been enhanced.

In addition, Photoshop’s new File Browser has been greatly improved, and now works much like a light table. This makes it much easier to add keywords to images and then search for those keywords. With this new version of Photoshop, it is also easier to select individual images and automate some of the functions applied to them.