The Right Tool For The Job

Always choose the right tool for the job—you know that. You wouldn’t use a beach towel to clean your lenses, for example, so why would you choose a mouse to do the work of a stylus? Using a mouse often is too clumsy for the precise work of creating selections or spotting filters and effects.

A better choice for many digital imaging tasks is a graphics tablet and pen. Designed to give you pinpoint accuracy and a more natural way of working, the graphics tablet is one of the best accessories you can have if you do a lot of Photoshop work and an essential tool if you work with painting or illustration software as well.

Comprised of a tablet and a cordless, pressure-sensitive stylus, a graphics tablet capitalizes on our familiarity with the pen. While a mouse is well suited for selecting menu items and placing a cursor, a pen is far more agile and easily manipulated when making finer, precise movements, especially when trying to follow organic curves or to spot-retouch.

“Typically, if I wanted to selectively darken certain areas of a subject around the ears, nose and hair, I’d have to create a mask, adjust the threshold or use the Polygonal lasso to create a path,” says Vincent Versace, a photographer and educator, who has made the use of graphics tablets a key component of his digital workflow. “All of that could take forever. What I can do with a pen and tablet—incrementally adjusting my brush size and pressure—is far more intuitive. I’m using my eye and my perception of the image on the screen to decide how deep I should go with a brush. I could never achieve that kind of a control with a mouse.”