Wacom Bamboo Fun Tablet and Graphic Design

The Wacom Bamboo Fun carries a $200 price-tag at Best Buy, but I think it was worth it. Perhaps the price can be a bit lower. It's quite a surprise that my Bamboo Fun came with a licensed copy of Adobe Illustrator. That takes off some of the price I suppose. I mean, I already have Adobe Photoshop Extended CS 5.5, so I don't see any need for Photoshop Elements, but now I have it.

Navigation: The user navigates over the surface of the tablet, touching it for a click or hovering 3mm above for cursor movements, with a stylus pen. Since the tablet makes navigation a bit difficult for me, I had to experiment to find a solution. I find clicking by touching the pad with the stylus hard to do. Scrolling by lifting the pen and dragging two fingers down the active area sometimes fails to work and is undesirable. I often deleted files by accident or dragged them into some unknown folder before arriving at a solution. The tablet doesn't move the cursor as a desktop mouse would, but jumps the cursor to a proportional coordinate on the screen relative to the tablet. This means that virtually, your tablet becomes your screen. Unfortunately, your tablet doesn't display your screen. Wacom does make a tablet that displays the screen, but its price-tag is much too high for the average user.

The solution: After using the tablet for a few weeks, I find that it has many cons. I was ready to return it a few times, but because I like to experiment, I plugged in my Microsoft wheel mouse. The tablet, when in conjunction with the wheel mouse, makes superb cursor navigation. I can click and scroll with the mouse and move the cursor with the stylus. With this navigation solution, it takes a total of $225, $25 for a cheap wheel mouse and $200 for the Wacom Bamboo Fun. As for the artist's software, that's an entirely different can of worms.

I developed the picture below in Adobe Lightroom and I used all the settings to make it look good to my eye. There are some neat things you can do with Lightroom. There's an option in there to crop and do other stuff as well. If you're a digital photographer or any kind of digital artist, Adobe Lightroom is worth checking out.


I set up my tablet like and easel and place a board in my lap as a mouse pad. I move the cursor with my Wacom pen as I click with the mouse. I also draw with the tablet much better than I can do with the mouse. I rejected it at first, but then I experimented with it and found a place for it.

I have a tilting table on wheels. I move that between my screen and me as I draw free-hand. A two-hand navigation input is a real relief for me because I've been ambidextrous for about 18 years now.