tybaltstone Posted February 1, 2016 Share Posted February 1, 2016 I have been playing with AP and AD for about a month now and have just started to use them for Actual Work. I've done my first project in Designer and that went really well - love it. Last night I got into my first commercial work using Photo, and unfortunately I had to revert to Photoshop to get the job finished (I was on a deadline, so it was partly that I didn't have time to learn as I go!) But a big part of it was that I find the AP pixel tool a bit stuttery. In Photoshop, the equivalent pencil tool is something I use a lot - for both bitmapped line work and then for colouring. I need precision and flow. My problem with the AP pixel tool is it seems very slightly laggy, and perhaps because of this (or maybe a separate reason) it is sometimes slow to catch up with my cursor and either jumps or doesn't draw at all. Even if I slow down I sometimes get a jump and therefore a broken line. It's difficult to explain so I recorded a video to compare. You'll see it's quite subtle, and you might wonder what the fuss is, but the flow is important otherwise it would add hours to my work. I hope you can see the difference between the two. It's mainly only apparent on small short lines, longer or bigger lines aren't as much of a problem, though sometimes still break. Does anyone else have this problem? Is it AP or is it my set up? I'm using a Wacom Intuos 4 (PTK-840), the driver is, I believe, the latest (6.3.15-2). Mac OS 10.11.3. Photoshop is CS4, and AP is 1.4.1. [The artwork in the video is an old piece and I'm just mucking about on it to demonstrate the type of thing I mean). https://youtu.be/3Pxpre0mkTA Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A_B_C Posted February 1, 2016 Share Posted February 1, 2016 Great work, tybaltstone … :) The “stutter” you are experiencing might be due to the Spacing settings of your brush. Could that be the cause of the issue? Have you already tried to reduce spacing to one percent? You could do so by clicking the More … button on the context toolbar … :) tybaltstone 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tybaltstone Posted February 1, 2016 Author Share Posted February 1, 2016 Thanks for that suggestion, A_B_C. Yes - it is at 1%. As well as using AP's default brushes with the pixel tool I created my own pixel tool brush - spacing 1%, hardness 100%. Many thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff DWright Posted February 1, 2016 Staff Share Posted February 1, 2016 I can see from your video that you have the flow setting to 100 so the line should have no delay, If you use a mouse or a trackpad rather than your tablet do you have the same delay. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tybaltstone Posted February 1, 2016 Author Share Posted February 1, 2016 Thank you for your suggestion, DWright. I get a similar kind of effect with a trackpad, though it's difficult to control that as well for drawing, so I'm not totally sure. The mouse also seems to sometimes miss drawing a line on short strokes - but I'm rather cack-handed at drawing with that! I get similar problems whether the 'force pressure' is toggled on or not, but perhaps it does have something to do with the way I use the pen ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
barninga Posted February 1, 2016 Share Posted February 1, 2016 could it be a momentarily boost in the cpu use, due to ap or some other running program? i happened to experience some dropouts in music reproduction when other programs did heavy use of computational resources, and solved it rising the priority of the audio daemon. tybaltstone 1 Quote take care, stefano Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tybaltstone Posted February 2, 2016 Author Share Posted February 2, 2016 Thanks for that idea barninga. I checked using the Activity Monitor and there's nothing alarming going on that I can see. I'm starting to suspect it's the way AP interacts with the Wacom stylus. But can I do anything about it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
barninga Posted February 2, 2016 Share Posted February 2, 2016 i am not sure that ap interacts directly with the graphic tablet. i'd expect them to have the system as event dispatcher. however i don't know osx' architecture enough to state that for good. also, i'm not sure that activity monitor's statistics refresh intervals do not hide instantaneous peaks. i do not want to insist on my hypothesis (which may be completely wrong)... i'd just would renice the processes and look at what happens :) Quote take care, stefano Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tybaltstone Posted February 2, 2016 Author Share Posted February 2, 2016 Thanks again, barninga. I'll look into this a little more deeply. Wouldn't I expect to get the same dropout with Photoshop, though? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
barninga Posted February 2, 2016 Share Posted February 2, 2016 yes, if the problem happens with ap only, it could mean that the cause is elsewhere. however, a driver or thread implementation can have a little more latency than others, and this could trigger the issue. don't waste time on it, just renice ap and (if applicable) any wacom-related process to -19 and see what happens. if it doesn't work, you just blew away one minute. Quote take care, stefano Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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