Cintiq 18sx
15 01 2008
I’ve just got myself a 2nd hand wacom cintiq. For those of you who don’t know what it is have a look at the wacom website. They are like graphics tablets but they are built into the monitor, so that you are using the pen on the screen rather than on a tablet. I’ve been wanting to get a tablet for a long time to speed up the time that I spend working on photographs, and I came across the cintiq on eBay.
I took a little bit of a gamble buying it as the guy selling it didn’t have a power supply and didn’t know if it was working, but man am I glad that I did. It is an incredible way to work on photographs. If you have spent any time air brushing a model you’ll know how clumsy a mouse is, and being able to work directly on the image makes it really easy and saves a lot of time.
Some of the nice features include being able to set up the pen for different programs. At the moment I’ve only configured it for Photoshop as that is the main program that use for working on photos. But I’ve found that it saves me time as well when I’m working in Lightroom, as I can slide the adjustment sliders with the pen rather than the mouse. It sounds like it shouldn’t be any different but there’s something about doing it with the pen that makes you feel like you have more control, that you can make finer adjustments, or maybe I just want to believe that my Cintiq can do anything.
It’s been a couple of months now since I got it and am still loving it, probably not using it for as many things as I thought I would but it’s really cool. For me the best thing is doing really fine touch-ups on photo’s with a pen rather than a mouse. It feels a lot more natural.
If you want to know anything specific about it I would be happy to answer questions.
