surface pro 3/4 pen problems

[henk brouwer]

Hi all,
I have a surface 3 1 year now and the biggest problem I have is with the pen!
I do all my work in photoshop with the pencil tool, my problem is that often when I want to change an angle with the A tool (shortcut) I cant get te point sometimes it takes 10 to 15 tries to move that point.
I get completely frustrated with that.

So last week the surface pro 4 I7 16gig came out and I bought it because they where saying that the pen is 20 times better.

So now after 2 days I m back with the same problem, I bought a new surface to get rid off this problem.

please does anyone had this or now a solution.

please,
best regards,
henk brouwer

 

[Moonsurface]

Hi, I use PS on my SP3 and just had a play with the pencil tool (which I never normally use) but can't understand what you mean by A tool and Angle (when I use the A shortcut on mine it just shows the active layer and control A selects all), can you explain in more detail so that I can try to see whether I have the same issue or not?


(Alternatively someone who uses the tool in the same way as you might be able to help)

 

[henk brouwer]

Quenten Brouwer Dec 14, 2015 2:35 AM (in response to JJMack)


Hi,

Thank you guys for the respond hoping you can help.



I have the new surface pro 4 with all the updates that can be with all of his updates. (also same for pro 3)

I use the latest version of Photoshop updated last November.



I use Photoshop mainly for my work, to draw lines I use the pen tool and on every point you get a handle you can move around or reshape.

With the path selection tool (a) I can readjust the handles and often this works good, but at some point it doesnt pick up the handle like I am not on the correct

point, I zoom in to see the point better but this doesn't help. sometimes it takes more then 10 tries to pick up the handle and move it around.



Hope this is more clear for you to understand my problem.



Henk

 

[Moonsurface]

Ahh I get you now I thought you meant the drawing pencil tool but you're talking about vector mode. I understand now. I'll have to play a bit more but I just tried and couldn't replicate your issue using PS CC SP4 pen on an i7 SP3, however it sounds like it's intermittent. I'll have more time to play later when I'm not at work. I don't use PS for work so can't really spend too much time playing with it!

 

[Moonsurface]

I had a play... Bearing in mind this isn't something I usually do so I just put a few points round the screen. Then tried to select. I did miss sometimes, as the line was very thin (you can see where I miss as the Square selection box opens up) . Is this similar to your experience?

I found if I concentrated on where the pointer actually was rather than the pen tip it was better - there is very little difference but when the line is extremely fine like this it makes the difference between selecting and not selecting.
This was PhotoshopCC (I haven't done the latest update yet) on Surface pro 3 i7 with Surface pro 4 pen. The experience on a Surface pro 4 may be better as the stack is even thinner so probably even less gap between the end of the pen and where the cursor is on the screen.

 

[henk brouwer]

thanks for trying this out, this is exactly what the problem is.
often it works exactly like you showed, but I don't know when at some point it doesn't want to pick up the points anymore.
maybe its because the processor is warm or memory or what ever.

even do that I try zooming in and I am 100 procent on the spot it doesn't pick it. I thought it was the problem for surface 3 because of the pen, but in 4 I have experienced the same problem.
It looks like the pen looses it accurateness.

It can be a combination of some things.

thanks again for testing.
hopefully someone has experienced the same and found a solution.

Henk

 

[Moonsurface]

Does it behave the same way on a Wacom or other tablet device. I have a Wacom intuos on my desktop pc I meant to try it but didn't get round to it this evening would also be interesting to try the Wacom plugged into the surface.....never tried that.

 

[henk brouwer]

No, as far with my Wacom I didn't experienced to many problems.

 

[Moonsurface]

Ok I'd next try plugging the wacom into the Surface to see if it's a pen or a surface problem.
Have you tried grabbing the handles with a mouse connected to the Surface to see if the problem exists there too using another input method?

 

[Moonsurface]

I had a quick play last night and I'm not really certain but the issue could be one of the way the N-trig screen registers the positions . Similar to the "jitter" issue when drawing slow straight lines perhaps.

I tried using the Pen tool in PS CC on my desktop PC and using my Wacom and mouse but I couldn't get the selection A tool to behave in anything like the same way it does on the Surface. Not sure why. When I selected on the PC it just moved the whole line rather than just the point.. which wasn't what I wanted to do. If I was using the pen tool I'd likely want to reposition points so I couldn't figure out what was different there between the two computers. So I couldn't really tell if the selection accuracy was better or not as it was more annoying not being able to do what I wanted to do!

I also tried using my Wacom on the Surface but although the USB wifi dongle was recognised the device wouldn't work and when I tried to download the drivers I got a message saying that the software wasn't compatible with my computer. I guess it doesn't play with Devices that already have pen input. Or maybe I accidentally downloaded the mac version I don't know.

 

[henk brouwer]

It also took me a while to get it working, however the cintiq didn't work, they told me that with windows 10 it works.
Also the intuos needs some tweeking with the surface it conflicts with the pen, but Wacom helped me to set them right.

In photoshop you have two path selection tools the black and white one, the black is for moving an complete path around and the white one to move points around.

Henk

 

[Moonsurface]

It also took me a while to get it working, however the cintiq didn't work, they told me that with windows 10 it works.
Also the intuos needs some tweeking with the surface it conflicts with the pen, but Wacom helped me to set them right.

In photoshop you have two path selection tools the black and white one, the black is for moving an complete path around and the white one to move points around.

Henk

Ahh I see. Thanks for that.

 

[jzucker]

I have the same issue. And the problem is the same with the cintiq and worse with the mobile studio pro. The problem isn't the surface, it's a combination of the fact the DPI is so high combined with the screen being so small combined with the surface pen hiding the adobe-pen-tool handles along with adobe not scaling up the pen-tool node handles on high DPI displays. Not sure why adobe has not addressed this. They made a modification over a year ago to scale the toolbars, menus and dialogs when working on high DPI displays but some things like the node handles on the pen tool were never changed. It's a really horrible experience and I would say that only about 10-20% of the time can I actually click on a node handle. The other 80-90% of the time, I end up creating a new line segment and having to resort to undo. Currently, what I do is use the touchpad when I have to use the pen tool but if it's anything elaborate, I resort to doing the work on my desktop. The reason it's easier there is

1) My display is 27" and standard HD
2) I'm using an intuos 5 pen so the pen itself doesn't hide the handles.

I blame adobe for this. It would be a simple fix for them to have different size node handles.

One thing I haven't tried is the windows magnifier. It might help but obviously if you're drawing anything large the magnifier would get in your way.