GFS

Just in case someone is trying and not finding these settings... they're in: System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility > WacomTouchDriver & WacomTabletDriver. Glad you got it working. Another ✅ to add to the list. 😊

Ldina, thanks so much for taking the time to summarise your findings. I’m retired now and rather sadly my tablet (PTK-640) has been sitting idle for quite a while. Now it’s New Year and my wife asks me to make her a NewYear best-wishes card for sending to clients and … oh dear … how do I do this again??? Apparently, 40 years as an adv-still-life photographer just idly drifts away. But I’m grumpy, so I decided to give it a go and thanks to your post, it wasn’t too hard. 😊 I had to remove Wacom files manually from the System/User Libraries. The Wacom Tablet Utility’s 'Remove' option told fibs about being successful. Then I tried to import my Wacom settings/prefs from my sooooo very carefully backed-up copies. It was confusing because I got 2 messages in the Wacom Tablet Utility. 1st said error, 2nd (below) said success. I tried this 2 or 3 times and it didn’t help. I also had a slightly worrying issue, that the Options button in the Wacom settings/prefs was crashing: 'LegacyLoader' (as I could see in Activity Monitor). So I did a Restart and on an old Mac, I made a new backup of the Wacom settings/prefs and copied it onto my M Mac and now Restore gave me *2* success messages. So WE NEED BOTH!! This suggests to me that it was a permissions issue, probably down to the somewhat complex Settings for Privacy & Security. Result - Whooopee!! I have my absurdly complex Wacom settings/prefs all back were they belong … built, excessively obsessively, over ~13 years. 😊 Thanks again!

In case it may be of help: I've just been trying to make a pano in vs1 of AFP and have come across this issue and consequently, this thread. 😊 I've been able to (laboriously) work around it by making 2 panos. 1st with normal exposure and the 2nd with considerably reduced exposure of ~ -1. I then Stacked these in AFP, which has enabled me to work the mix as I want. It's a bit of a pain.. but it works. It took quite a lot of trials to see how and when AFP squishes the highlights. It all seems ok, you try a bit less dark, then wooops ... 255 all round. The dark areas required to maintain the highlights in the final image are relatively small/delicate/blended so there's not really any concerns about image quality dropping.

Is that a promise?

So did you use Live Picture? If not, then how can you have an informed opinion about it? Either way, it makes no difference. Serif will do what works best for them. The only point I'm making, is that this sort of tool, existed 30 years ago, in an app, that sadly didn't survive the usual bunch of money grubbers that got their hands on it and the industry carried on with the likes of Adobe running their company as a 'buy and kill' machine. Sigh.

The past was just fine thank you. (Maybe you missed my little screen-grab-video of a 30yr old app where a brushstroke/shape/selection of any sort, is automatically a vector and therefore can be reshaped with a brush, or turned the opposite way into a shape with Nodes? FWIW, Adobe have never managed this either. Also FWIW, although it probably won't mean much to today's users... my very first job, using the software, was a 100mpx file, in 1995, on a Mac that could only just fit the file onto it's HD and despite that, LP ran in 'real-time'. Not even a hint of spinning beachballs. Everything, every gesture, was instant. Like painting on paper. The only wait time, was once finished, producing an output file, which could take a while. Maybe as much as 20mins, but usually only 2 or 3. You could batch output though.)

😊 Amazing that there's anything really. The last vs was produced in '97. There are so many things which it did so well and that are still unmatched today. Example: Imagine taking a 300megapixel 16-bit tiff, then, using a brush of 500megapixel size, distort your image in a single smooth, gentle brush-stroke... and ... the distortion is applied as you paint/brush in real-time. The instant you lift your brush, it's done. Even if you take your brush and do a frantic squiggle back and forth, it's done instantly. Not even a seconds pause. Instant.

Live Picture, by Live Picture (a bunch of recently graduated students). It was essentially a compositing software, which was conceived to be able to do on a Mac, what was until then, done in *extremely* expensive retouching houses, as they moved away from manual retouching (transparencies, scalpels, bleach and tiny-brush+ink). These large installations were pixel-pushers with the actual computers themselves in separate rooms due to their size and required air-conditioning. Typically 2x ~2metre cube sized units, on the floor. Cost ~£2million late80s + 1 year operator training. Cost to client ~£500 per hour. Obviously their use was almost 100% advertising. It was pretty crazy, i.e. loony.. to think it could be done on a Mac back then, but 2 years mathematical thinking, followed by 2 years programming and there it was. No other app has ever come close to what it could do, even though the patents have been over for a while. Happy to expand if anyone is interested.

Well, sort of. But as you can see, it paints like a pixel brush and not a vector brush. However, if you want to use your painting as a vector 'shape' with handles, then it makes a vector shape, with points/handles, from the paint. You can choose how exact you want the shape... how many pixels per point. However, it leaves the brushed paint untouched, with its normal stencil/mask. Basically ... think of every variation and it does it. Did I mention it's also unbelievably fast? 😊

As I pointed out ... it's a very old app. Back in those days, the UI wasn't as sophisticated as now, but yes you could manipulate your vector mask in the same way as today. Actually ... it is in fact a vector as you paint. Not in the sense you are used to, but it is a vectorial description and the only pixels involved are produced in order to draw it on the screen, as a UI description of the vectors.

Indeed I am. As I mentioned... it is all vectors except for screen-draw. The clip doesn't show working from a selection, but it's exactly the same. I could just make a selection and it would automatically be: mask / stencil / vectorial. Can AFP make paint into a vectorial mask/stencil, by dragging the mask icon?

Seems Windows 10 has issues with mp4. ( https://videoconvert.minitool.com/video-converter/windows-10-cant-play-mp4.html ) I've uploaded a .mov vs, which is 10x larger... but maybe it'll work. Mask-Stencil-mov Otherwise maybe you could try a different browser.

That's pretty weird.. What OS are you on? For me it just goes on loop in the forum software. (Quite annoying actually). Try this: Mask-Stencil

Actually ... it is entirely vector based. There are absolutely no pixels involved apart from screen-drawing/representation.

I'm showing what I could do in an app, almost 30 years ago. Yes, as you can see, paint already has a mask, made as you paint, which can instantly be toggled between a stencil and a mask and also drag-copied to any other layer, as a stencil and a mask. It's instant. It's easy. It's automatic. It's a good method. The point of this thread, is that this cannot be done in AF apps.