Pen pressure and tapering problems

I'm also realy waiting for an update that fix this issue

and if btw you could add touch gesture compatibility to paint tool sai

and maybe a calibration soft for the surface pen that would be wonderfull

thank you for listening to our problems =)

Hello Greg,

what is the status on this issue? Are you working on it? That would be really great for all us artists out there using the surface pro 4 :). Thanks a lot.

Dominik

Hi,

I am experimenting with my new Surface Pro, which I bought exclusively for my artistic needs.

Needless to say that the pen is very important to me, but it doesn't look to work as I expected, and I'm on the fence to return the product.

Microsoft has recently proven to listen to their customer though, so I hope this message will reach them.

Among some minor issues (lag while hovering and strange right-click behaviour), the real problem I have, is the necessary force to activate the pen to execute a stroke.

It's difficult to describe, but it looks to me that I need to press way more than expected to actually start to draw a line with the pen.

Please note that I tried the Surface app to set different pressure curves, together with 3 different applications (ZBrush, Mischief and Fresh Paint).

All of these applications showed the same problem. It's kind of difficult to describe, but if you're putting a light pressure on the screen, you can clearly feel the tip of the pen rubbing the screen, but no stroke will be produced.

Even worse, if I try to modulate the pressure of the stroke, from strong to light, and strong again, I will get intermittent/broken lines.


My brain in some way is tricked to think that the pen is writing, but the result is wrong, causing a discomforting feeling.

It's like drawing with a pen that has almost finished its ink.

I can't say how much this is heartbreaking and painful... it's really difficult to get the type of strokes I would like with this kind of behavior. Please note that I never noticed this kind of discomfort with any Wacom technology I tried.

Also, to be sure I haven't a broken pen, I went Today to the closest store with an available sp4, and I can confirm that I could feel the same kind of oddness with that device as well.

Now my question is: is this a hardware problem? Does the pen really start to register the stroke only after so much pressure? Or could it be solved with a future firmware update?

I am really looking forward to a reply, and hope it could be solvable with a software upgrade (even though I doubt it).

If the issue is in the hardware, I will sadly have to return the product, even if I love.

EDIT:

I just found a discussion on reddit where people is complaining about the same problem:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/3ttia5/sp4\_pen\_not\_picking\_up\_lighter\_strokes\_advice/

EDIT2:

I see that the user John1F merged this question of mine into this thread.

I want to specify that the two questions are quite different: 

• Brad is pointing out to tapering problems in the stroke, which is a big issue.
• Me instead I'm asking why I need so much pressure on the pen to activate the stroke. It's a totally different issue (even though it's still related to the pen pressure), and as much as I know it could be an hardware limitation instead of a software bug.

Hi Brad,

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We are looking into this now.

What version of Photoshop are you using?

Stay tuned.

Thanks,

Greg