Photoshop Peripherals

[Indigo]

I thought you guys may be interested in this..  The following was also posted at my Blog

A couple weeks ago, as I was painting in Photoshop, I realized how much time I wasted doing the most mundane of things.  Specifically how often I'm playing with various brush sliders rather than painting on the canvas.  It occurred to me that it would be the most awesome thing ever if someone had made a USB controller specifically with Photoshop in mind; something that would have physical knobs or sliders that would effect brush size, opacity, and hardness on the fly so one could continually paint with their other hand.  I went searching for such a device.

After a few days it became apparent that no such thing existed.  I was pretty shocked.  I can't imagine that I'm the only CG artist who has thought of this before.  I guess input-device companies are too busy making the same redundant crap they always have, just with an ever growing number of LED lights to make us feel more like we're studly men in a nightclub rather than geeks in our mother's basement.  In any case, I needed an alternate solution

This time I went searching for any piece of hardware that generally resembled what I was looking for, and hopefully I'd be able to Jerry-rig it to Photoshop.  I was imagining a simple board with maybe 4 parallel vertical sliders, but the only thing I could find that even came close were MIDI mixing boards.  Not only could I not map them to Photoshop shortcut keys, but they are all WAY TOO BULKY.  I swear, there is not a single mixing board out there without 50 billion dials, knobs, and sliders.  I just wanted something simple.



You'd think there would be a huge market for general purpose programmable USB input devices; Programmable in the sense it could be mapped to keystrokes.  Just a simple programmable slider board - or maybe a simple set of knobs.  I know PLENTY of computer professionals that could find a good use for things like this.  If any of you out there is thinking, "That's a great idea for a business!" PLEASE DO!  For the love of Pete, please do!

I finally found one.  Its Griffin's PowerMate USB knob.  Its not exactly what I was looking for, but it was programmable, and it would work for what I needed.  I ordered two and they just arrived in the mail today



Initially setting it up was a breeze. Their software for it was amazingly easy to use.  Each knob has 6 different functions you can assign to it; rotate left, rotate right, press-rotate left, press-rotate right, press, press and hold.  Not only can you set different macros for each function, but you can also set different profiles for each program you use them with.  Very cool.

On the first knob, I mapped brush-size to the rotation (using the [ and ] shortcuts) and mapped the brush-hardness to the press-ratation (using the { and } shortcuts).  On the second knob I mapped undo and redo to the press-rotation.  Lastly, I wanted the second knob to control the brush opacity, but there are not any photoshop shortcut keys for that - at least not in the same way as brush size and hardness.  The 0-9 keys at the top of the keyboard sets the opacity ('4' = 40% opacity, '5' = 50% opacity, etc) and there was no way to map the same function of the PowerMate to multiple buttons through their own software.  I needed a 3rd party app for that.

I came across AutoHotKey.  This seems to be exactly what I needed.  Essentially, AutoHotKey allows you to script macro events.  So the plan was to use it to detect the knob rotations as keypresses, then script that to output the proper opacity percents back into Photoshop.  It took a while, but it worked like a charm.  I had to write my own script for it since none existed.  If anyone is interested, let me know and I'll post it up.

The last thing I wanted to do was map the first knob's press function to the Alt key (Shortcut key for eyedropper tool while in brush-mode).  You'd think this would be easy, but nothing I tried was working.  After a bit of investigating I discovered that the PowerMate's software only supports quick keypresses and NOT press-and-hold like the eyedropper shortcut needed.  This really upset me.  I use the eyedropper tool a ton.  I'm hoping I can find someone to edit the .dll file for me to fix this problem.  In the mean-time, I've mapped Alt to one of the function keys on my tablet.

I'll keep you posted, But I will say that I can already see a dramatic increase in my workflow because of this.

[davidelrizzo]

That is very cool! 
I don't personally freehand draw enough to use it myself but I'm sure if you did that kind of stuff every day it would be a huge time saver.

[Jakten]

Oh man these are awesome! I'm so buying some of these!

I'm trying to think if there is a way to wire 3 dimmer switches together with a USB plug and use it for changing RGB... also a separate USB keypad or something and hooking it up for other shortcuts that you might not be able to map. Mount it all on some wood like a joystick. Awesome idea. These knobs are wicked. Amazing find!

I wonder how easy it would be to find mix board slider switches separate from a mixing board...

I figure it would look something like this (possibly cut a bunch of the keypad buttons off so its not as bulky, also maybe replace them with pretty arcade buttons):

[Ai]

I was curious whether they worked in Linux/GIMP, since I've had my eye on some of these for quite a while.

http://linuxrevolution.blogspot.com/2006/12/howto-griffin-powermate-in-gimp.html
^^^
How to set them up under Linux and configure them for use in GIMP.

Anyone should be able to do the same (steps 1 and 3, omit step 2) for setting up under Windows, if they know how to specify the device (I don't, I only know how to specify the device under Linux.)

I suspect that a similar hack would be required to get the Powermate 'press' function producing a Control press+release event pair for GIMP (Paint tools use Ctrl to eyedrop in GIMP, rather than Alt), whether in Windows or Linux.

Personally, what I want is some knobs and sliders -- maybe 5 knobs and 2 sets of 7 sliders --
to control stuff like brush parameters (rotation/size/aspect/spacing), opacity and drawing mode, layer opacity and (maybe) drawing mode, foreground color, and move through the list of brushes or move through the undo history.
 So a lot less than a MIDI mixing board, but a lot more than a Powermate.
I do currently do some of these things via keyboard shortcuts, which can sometimes be slow (brush size adjustment, brush spacing adjustment.)

[surt]

If hard controls aren't a necessity, you could sit one of those small USB touch-screen displays under your secondary hand, and with the appropriate software it could be a workable solution.

[JonathanOfDrain]

http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus-tactus/
This looks like the kind of thing you want. The Optimus Maximus is expensive but you can do a lot with it. It's about 1300 USD.
You might want to look around for replacement parts to these USB mixers. I had some for a small Mackie mixer, ended up needing them for the mixer. Not exactly plug and play stuff going on.
You'll need to read up on hardware and programming.

[Indigo]

Jakten:
those pictures look exactly like what I was originally looking for - though I dont care much for the RGB idea.. I'd rather just handle that part on screen.  The problem with sliders in general though is they can't be mapped to a single key press when sliding up and another for sliding down.  to do it right, you'd want the slider to return distinct VALUES depending on where it's positioned (ie all the way up = 100, all the way down = 0) so it could visually represent the value it's sending to the software.  It'd definitely be the preferred way if you could, but I dont know of any way it'd be possible to pass those values from the hardware to photoshop.

Surt:
cool idea, but I think the tactile feel of the knobs/sliders is what I really wanted.  -so I dont have to look at what my hand is doing or where it needs to go - I just keep looking at the screen and paint.

JonathanOfDrain:
from my hours of internet searching, I wasn't able to find any program that converts midi input to keypresses.  I was able to find one vise-versa though.  So even with a USB mixer and/or parts I wouldn't be able to link it to photoshop.

[Ai]

Jakten:
those pictures look exactly like what I was originally looking for - though I dont care much for the RGB idea.. I'd rather just handle that part on screen.  The problem with sliders in general though is they can't be mapped to a single key press when sliding up and another for sliding down.  to do it right, you'd want the slider to return distinct VALUES depending on where it's positioned (ie all the way up = 100, all the way down = 0) so it could visually represent the value it's sending to the software.  It'd definitely be the preferred way if you could, but I dont know of any way it'd be possible to pass those values from the hardware to photoshop.

You're quite sure that you need to do that? GIMP for example can read those events directly (if they eg. send a value on the range 0..1.0, there are commands designed specifically to work with that, like "Set drawing opacity"
(versus what you seem to be thinking of, that increase/decrease by a step)). The functionality of GIMP and Photoshop doesn't perfectly overlap, but I thought this kind of thing would be a fairly basic functionality to expect in PS.
Alternatively, the driver could generate keyboard events by internally tracking the position of the sliders and sending events according to how many 'steps' were between the old and new positions.
Your tablet driver does something very similar to this when it's emulating a mouse (ie. in relative mode).

JonathanOfDrain:
from my hours of internet searching, I wasn't able to find any program that converts midi input to keypresses.  I was able to find one vise-versa though.  So even with a USB mixer and/or parts I wouldn't be able to link it to photoshop.

Again, at this point, I must ask: And Photoshop doesn't accept MIDI input directly? This is extraordinary if it's true.

[Indigo]

as far as I know, I've never seen anything to suggest photoshop accepts midi input.  please, if you know something i dont - please tell!

[Rox]

Wow. I feel stupid. Over a year ago, when I started my internship during my 3D education, another guy at the same company had one of those. I was like "Why? Why would you need that?" and he said he really likes it for quickly controlling the volume on his comptuter when using headphones. And thus, in my head, the peripheral remained useless.

Why the heck didn't I think of using it for something like that? And why didn't he, for that matter? Considering he spent hours at end sculpting in Zbrush with his fancy tablet... and then spent many more hours polishing way too large textures in Photoshop... Really good thinking, there, Indigo. Do get back on how well you get along with them, and I might have to pick some up in the future. They could be very useful both for 2D and 3D work.