Do you find it hard to achieve 100% pressure with your Wacom? Is you art getting tired while painting? There's a solution. In this video I demonstrate a way to significantly reduce the force required to achieve 100% opacity on a Wacom tablet. This is personally important to me, because I've narrowly avoided a repetitive stress injury (think carpal tunnel) due to long hours in Photoshop. If you're getting tired or sore by using your tablet, it's time to fix the problem. You're not being a noble artist by suffering through the pain.
"Half pressure" is personal preference. You could experiment with 1/3 pressure or even less to see how it feels. To achieve this, just use lower numbers for the first item of each pair. 500 is roughly half of 1024, but I could have entered '200' for a very aggressive reduction.
It's worth mentioning that this technique only works for Wacom tablets on the PC. If you know a way to make this same change on a Mac, please let us know in the comments!
I'm aware that this is 'possible' within the official Wacom properties (Customize Tip Feel Graph) - but it only allows for a 30% reduction in pressure. I desire a 50% reduction, and I could imagine others preferring even more aggressive settings. As an ironic side-note, the Wacom properties graph will actually display the results of the text-document fix --- it just won't let you create the change. So it's clearly one line of code in the config software that they're unwilling to change.
Important details mentioned in the video
Preferences file path (PC):
...Users / (your name) / AppData / Roaming / WTablet
File name:
Wacom_Tablet.Dat
Search for this text string:
PressureCurveControlPoint
Numbers to modify:
<stuff> 81 0 1023 1023 2047 2047 </stuff>
Task Manager / Services:
Ctrl+Shift+Escape
(Don't forget to stop the service before modifying the text file)
Free text editor - Notepad ++