I’ve been thinking about getting a tablet for a while. Soooo many Photoshop folks swear by them, I figured they couldn’t be too wrong. And that was confirmed at DLWS when Joe Sliger from Wacom had tablets to share with us for our use during the session.

I was blown away! The control available using the tablet and pen was unlike anything I’d ever used before, and I decided then that I absolutely had to have one. I grabbed Joe for a few minutes and talked about the various models, and we decided that with the 20″ widescreen display on the iMac, the 6×11 “widetablet” would be the best answer.

An eBay buy-it-now later on Sunday, I had an Intuos3 headed my way. And today, it arrived!

The box was ginormous — easily two feet long — and I was concerned that maybe I had waaaay overbought, and not realized the size of the big tablet. However, once I opened the shipping box, and got the Wacom box out, I realized that it was just very well packed. The tablet itself is about 13″ wide, and about 9″ deep — a quite manageable size.

Joe told me at DLWS that many folks work with the tablet in their lap, and I may get to that point, but I think for now, it’ll be desk based. With that size tablet, there’s a bunch of desk real estate eaten up, so I may need to do a little redesigning around the thing, with maybe a “tablet house” under the iMac into which to slide it. I got nothing but time to figure that one out.

The biggest challenge so far? The same one I had at DLWS. I can’t figure out when I’m actually on the tablet, touching it. The sensitivity is such that when the pen is just over a quarter-inch above the tablet, the cursor on the screen starts responding and moving, so my brain says I’m making contact, but I’m actually not. It’s kinda like walking down steps, and thinking the next one is a little closer than it really is. 🙂

So, it’s a new world for me and my photos. I think in the last six months, I have done so much to improve my workflow and tools, that my photos will almost certainly suffer the benefits of all these new things!