Pen pressure and tapering problems

Anonymous
2015-11-08T20:03:41+00:00

I love the new SP4 pen, but I've noticed the pen pressure is not consistent. The biggest problem is that paint brush strokes in Photoshop don't taper smoothly when drawing. I tired using the SP4 pen on my Surface Pro 3 and it doesn't have any problem. Here is a screen capture of what I'm talking about.

Since the pen isn't the problem I'm assuming it's a calibration issue with the Surface Pro 4. I downloaded new Wintab drivers to see if that would solve the problem (got the idea from this thread about pen problems).

It's not just Photoshop. The actual Surface pen pressure app has the same problem. It's harder to see because the brush strokes are thinner, but there is a much faster tapering happening than there is on the Surface Pro 3. Here is a screen cap:

Surface | Surface Pro | Performance and maintenance

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Anonymous
2016-07-15T19:53:13+00:00

Hey Everyone!

Thanks for all the feedback!

As some of you have already noticed, on July 14th, 2016, we released an update to the Surface Touch Driver that should significantly improve the pen tapering and pressure experience that this thread talks about.

For more information on the 7/14 update, you can go here.

If you experience any difficulty downloading or installing updates, please check the Troubles installing Surface and Windows updates article for assistance.

Thanks!

Zachary

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-02-10T13:09:20+00:00

    If you want a partial solution to the lag problem, here a Reddit thread to help you with the wintab32 issue:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/3udwvo/pressure\_sensitivity\_jumps\_to\_maximum\_frequently/cxefb9y

    I'm not sure what softwares you're using, but both Mischief and Photoshop for example, they support ntrig by default, and they lag with wintab32.

    So, switch to wintab32 only when necessary, i.e. for applications like zbrush, that don't support ntrig natively.

    I know it's not ideal, especially if you are switching between two different application that use either on or the the other pen driver, but it will greatly help alleviating your pain, as it helped me :)

    Sadly, this will not fix the tapering issue.

    And still it is not known if the initial activation force required to enable the stroke will ever be fixed.

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-02-07T18:42:02+00:00

    Over 3 month and still not fixed...

    it's a shame microsoft ...

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-02-07T17:56:48+00:00

    bleh never mind about it being fixed, it's super bad if I try to draw short fast strokes... like only half of them show up a half sec after I draw them, and they're usually the wrong width/ size. Making it impossible to draw any kind of details o_<

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-02-07T16:27:29+00:00

    Yea I'm not really sure what's going on, MS's site just says to install wintab and some surface firmware which I'm not sure what it does? 

    Hmm it looks like the beginning/end problem as Dave Martins described has largely went away after updating windows and photoshop a couple times... 

    Now I'm getting the same exact problem as OP though, with the tapering, but I guess I can work with it for now by drawing slower.

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