Adobe Photoshop + Sensel Morph Megathread

Hey everyone,

Thought I would get this going, since I didn’t see an existing thread for Sensel and Photoshop CS6. I received my morph tonight and was super excited to get home from work and start tinkering.

So far everything is super responsive. I followed the http://sensel.com/start instructions to get going and installed both the Sensel software, and the driver for macOS. I opened up photoshop and used the tutorial outlined here to get Photoshop to recognize the pressure sensitivity. Photoshop sees the brush, but it looks very jittery. It also has difficulty discerning proximity – (i.e.- if I lift the brush and bring it down the canvas a bit, it jumps up rather than continuing position.) this could be due to the palm detection. I also have the art overlay, so I went into the overlay for the Art panel and adjusted the sensitivity. It still is jittery despite the jitter being turned off in the brush shape dynamics and transfer.

Wanted to see if 1) Anyone else was encountering this and 2) if there is a way to get photoshop to detect the pressure? I have a “warning” icon next to the pen pressure dropdown on shape dynamics and transfer.

Thanks in advance. Great device so far, is living up to it’s own standards.

Also worth mentioning that I don’t see the functionality of the art overlay working as designed within Photoshop – which makes me wonder if Photoshop requires some sort of plugin to detect the specific inputs of a hot key? In the art overlay preview in the SenselApp, there is an outline of the default hotkeys. The upper middle double dot “…” button is supposed to call (Option + CMD + Z) on the Mac, which will continue step backwards in history in Photoshop normally. That key combo isn’t working in Photoshop (see screenshot for what I mean).

Hello, thank you for the feedback. Our team will look into your initial post and get back to you in the near future, but I wanted to quickly mention that you should press “Send Map to Morph” in order to use the Mac Cmd mapping. Currently, Art overlay ships with Windows hot keys enabled (Ctrl instead of Cmd). We are investigating ways to make the process of switching between Mac and PC easier. Thank you for posting this feedback and we will make sure to mention this in the guide to prevent confusion.

With regard to your initial post, here are a few things to try.

Pressure:

  1. If pressure is not working, make sure the driver is enabled. After installing the driver, go into System Preferences and click on Sensel Driver. If the Enable Driver is not selected, please select the box. To be safe, unplug and replug the Sensel Morph back into the computer.
  2. If the macOS driver is enabled, make sure that pressure is turned on for you brush. Go into the Brush panel in Photoshop and go to “Brush Dynamics”. In the first dropdown labeled “Control” select “Pen Pressure”. Make sure to set your Minimum Diameter to a lower number. Now, your brush should be receiving pressure. If not, please let us know.

Jitter:
If you are using a soft bristle brush, we would recommend trying the “Painting Mode” found in the No Overlay section. Make sure to click “Send to Morph” after selecting “Painting Mode” from the dropdown. The Art Overlay currently works well with a pen or stylus, but our soft brush drawing algorithms work best with a bare sensor. We understand that the buttons are useful for artists so we will continue to update the Art Overlay software going forward. In the meantime, you can also try a stiffer brushes and fingers, which may help with tracking.

Thank you again for your feedback and I hope this response helps. Enjoy your Morph!

I appreciate your response. I didn’t know about the “send map to morph” command. So this part is working for me now. Thank you - Danielle

Tried what you suggested. checklist:

  • Drivers are enabled
  • pressure is turned on for brushes (this is per brush so i have one example)
  • I was using a soft physical brush, but switched to a hard physical one to see if there was a difference. It did change slightly, but on the bare sensor I still have to push quite hard to get it to register, and then the line much thicker than i want and doesn’t tail on either end when pressure is released. same with fingers. It is even more jittery on a bare sensor with fingers

Thank you for the picture. Here are a few more things to try:

  1. I see you modified the brush opacity of the brush using Pen Pressure. Did you also go into “Brush Dynamics” at the top left of the Brush Panel and select “Pen Pressure” for brush size? This should modify the brush size over the stroke.
  2. Go into the Art Overlay section of the Sensel App and press “Send To Morph” to ensure that all the values are set correctly.

If neither of these work, could you send the version of Mac (i.e. macOS Sierra 10.12.5) and Photoshop (i.e CC 2017) so we can recreate your setup. Thank you again for your feedback.

I’m having the same problem as well, Mac OS X 10.12.4 and Photoshop CC 2017. At home I use a windows computer which works fine, but at work I use a MacBook, and I cant’t get Photoshop to register brush pressure at all (exclamation mark next to pressure, rotation, and tilt). I have both the app and driver installed, and have tested in app and can confirm it registers pressure there.

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Thank you for reporting the issue along with your OS and Photoshop version. We will attempt to recreate the issue on our side and will let you know when a fix is available.

Yes, I did try toggling between pen pressure fro brush size, but it didn’t seem to make a difference.
Sending the config in the overlay section did set the values, but that was just for the overlay. on a bare “paintbrush mode” morph, I experience similar or nearly the same behavior as with an overlay, where it’s jittery. This is over USB not bluetooth, mind you. Over bluetooth I’m having detection issues.

Over USB, in the visualizer, I can replicate the behavior with any brush, hard or soft, and see that the tracking is indeed wavering in the pickup. With even pressure applied, I can watch the detection heat jump around and get randomly wider and narrower with each stroke. So it’s as if it’s not properly reading input.

Furthermore – with bluetooth: when I take a look at Bluetooth Explorer (OS X Dev kit) and watch the console logging, I see a TON of read errors for the Sensel. I can provide examples, but I was poking around in there to try and figure out the objectclass for displaying battery health or percentage in the menu. Based on the console log errors and the behavior it’s describing in the bluetooth logging, it appears as though Sensel is being categorized as an Audio device.

FWIW: My specs are macOS Sierra 10.12.5, Adobe Photoshop CS6 v13.0 x64 bit.

Thank you for your continued patience and feedback. We have recreated the bug on another Mac and are in the process of fixing the driver bug. I will follow up when an update is available.

As for Bluetooth, we currently do not support digitizer/art over Bluetooth. The current Bluetooth device supports MIDI (hence the audio device), keyboard, and touchpad mouse. Going forward, we will continue to expand Bluetooth functionality and support.

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To follow up on this thread, we believe we have confirmed a fix registering pressure/tilt/rotation:

“We’re happy to report that the macOS bug has been identified. If your macOS Sensel Driver is experiencing issues, please ensure that the Sensel Driver has been enabled in System Preferences and unplug/replug your Morph. That should resolve the issue, but please let us know if you’re still experiencing any problems.”

In other words, make sure you close Photoshop and unplug your Morph before installing the driver. Alternately restart/unplug both after installing. If you continue to have issues, please let us know.

Separately, we are working with dmbeckemeyer to discover the source of the jitter.

I have a problem with using a light brush (on the bare sensor). If I use a hard brush, then it works ok, but I have to press too hard with the soft brush (the soft brush is detected just fine in the visualizer). Is it possible to adjust the force needed before a touch is registered in Photoshop? (Or is this set in the driver, can it be adjusted in the morph software?)

You can set some of the thresholds for detection in the Art Overlay section of the Sensel App. We will be providing more options in future software and firmware releases. Thank you for your patience.

Does that also affect the use of a paint brush on the bare sensor? I did not notice any immediate effect.

I should mention that I find the paint brush mode to be quite spectacular already, without the ability to tweak sensitivity. This analog+digital setup is completely different from using a completely digital setup (e.g. an ipad with an apple pencil with pressure sensitivety and tilt.) Although I am not an artist, opinions may of course differ.

I’m on Windows 10 and I’m not seeing the settings that dmbeckemeyer showed in the attached screenshot. On my system, the app looks like a giant Android app with just buttons to set up the overlays.There’s no title bar, no settings to enable driver, launch on startup etc. The “Morph Settings” button just shows details about the firmware/app version/serial number and a button to update the firmware. Oh and there’s NO EXIT BUTTON. There’s no right-click context menu, no minimize, resize, nada. I’m basically have to crash out of the app by closing it using Windows or Alt-F4 (very old school).

And yes, if you’re wondering why I’m in post, it’s because the Art overlay is working like a giant touchpad.

Thank you for your feedback on the Sensel App. You can also quit the app using Control+Q. We will make sure there is an exit button and menu in future versions. We will also make sure to add this to the guide.

With regard to the settings, those are part of the macOS Driver, which is not required for Windows 10 at this point. The current OS requirements for the driver are listed at sensel.com/start.

I could have sworn I tried Ctrl-Q. I also downloaded the trial for Photoshop CC (7 days free). Once I paid attention to what the App was telling me on the overlay settings page, I set my Size Jitter to Tilt and Opacity Jitter to Pen Pressure and it started working. Awesome!

Thanks for the quick answers.

Hi there
This information seems good. Thanks for sharing.
Also I’d like to provide you information about Adobe PS express editor. Nowadays it’s especially actual.


Cheers

The Sunset inspired me to check the old art overlay again - it is a bit quirky but fun, still.
( running on an OSX virtual machine now though to get the pen pressure working )