To use the Wacom Intuous 4 in the most effective and convenient way it is essential to set it up for your personal hardware and taste.

 

From now and on I will use the Wacom board in conjunction with the screen I use at home and all settings that I make and use is for my 1600x1200px resolution 20" monitor.

Anyhow the settings you should chose is not only dependent of the native resolution of your screen.
It is also dependent of your type of work and your
way to work.

I will not write a user manual here since that has already been done by Wacom, but I will try to highlight the most important settings :0)

In the Wacom manual that can be found here you can read.

"Note: The tablet active area is a mapped representation of your computer screen(s), and by default uses the entire screen or all screens if you have multiple displays."

This will probably no suit you in all your work and it will definitely not suit
me since I intend to use my Wacom board for various tasks and in several
different applications.

You can save several different settings as Application-specific .
The Wacom Tablet control panel enables you to customize a tool to behave uniquely in different applications. Application-specific settings are in effect whenever you use the specific application.

Example:

1. I use a drawing app to sketch with and like my sketches to be fast to    draw they don't require perfection in precision and I draw with small pen    movements so I set the active area to be small maybe as small as a    "sticky note" and still this small area will correspond to my full screen    size.

2. I work with a critical retouch in Photoshop or Gimp and need pixel level
    control, I then use the whole board as active and zoom in to my image
    to get control over those pixels.

3-1000. Different situations demands different settings :0)

 

Many people reports that the new design with oled labeled buttons and a Ipod style touch ring is a major improvement from the earlier designs.

Since I haven't used any of the earlier wacom designs for myself I just have
to take there words for it, and I agree that it would probably have been
even tougher to learn to use the board without those functions since the
oled labeling help me to remember what the buttons (Express keys) will do
for me when I hit them:0)

From the top.

Tablet field is for users of several different pen tablets and here you can
select which one that should be active.

Tool make your selection here to adjust settings for different tools.

Application make it possible to save custom settings for different
applications.

The Express keys and touch ring part of the Wacom pen board are customizable and the text next to the button will change in accordance
with the setting of the buttons.

The touch ring is also possible to customize and can have four different
functions enabled at the same time that are selectable by toggling with
the center button of the touch ring, no oled text labels for those selections thought, only a blue dot that moves.

There is also a Radial menu that are possible to configure for different
tasks this menu is called up by pressing a radial menu express key if a
such key has been configured the radial menu will then appear on your
screen with its possible selections and they are almost infinite possibility's
and variations for how you can configure this menu .

Setting up the Wacom board are not at all difficult or cumbersome it just
require some of your time and patience to learn and to find out how to best
use them.

I found that using a preset for Precision mode was nice since then I could
map my Wacom medium sized pen board to only use part of the board as
active area for fast movements over the screen, and still be able to get
high precision when needed, it is a bit like having a bike with two gears!
Precision mode means that you have to move your pen a lot more, to get
the same movement on screen. This is great for detailed drawing or
critical retouch in tight spaces.

Most important is to try try and try again and don't be afraid of try
everything, because you might miss some very useful features if you do.

Comment this review here!