From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

860 Using an iPad as a Sidecar drawing tablet

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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860 Using an iPad as a Sidecar drawing tablet

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- Hey, gang. This is Deke McClelland. Welcome to the very first "Deke's Techniques" of the year 2020, and this one's a doozy. But I should say up front it's not necessarily for everyone, and that's because today we'll be talking about how if you own an iPad along with a Macintosh computer that supports macOS Catalina, You can take advantage of a feature called Sidecar that lets you control Photoshop, the real Photoshop running on a real Mac from your iPad. You can actually see the real Photoshop or Illustrator or whatever on your iPad screen. Notice, here's Photoshop. Plus, we have these additional Sidecar only controls along the bottom and right hand edge. And see this white line here? It's not much, it's just the first of what will be many, but it tapers, and that's because I drew it on my iPad Pro using a pressure-sensitive Apple Pencil. Now, even if you don't own all these gadgets, even if you regard the Apple community as a kind of cult, which it is, by the way, and I don't say that because I'm working for what is currently a Microsoft-owned company, it's because I'm part of that cult. Even if you shake your head in dismay at the very thought that instead of making the MacBook Pro screen touch sensitive, Apple makes you buy an additional device to bring its laptop up to speed with the less-expensive Surface Book, well, I don't know, it's still worth knowing about the latest and greatest technology. I'm right, right? Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, in this very special bonus movie, I'm going to show you how to use an iPad along with an Apple Pencil as a Sidecar inside Photoshop. So the idea is you can turn your iPad into a pressure-sensitive drawing device, much like a Wakom Cintiq, so you can see exactly what you're doing. All right, so we got to start it off with the system requirements. This is a Mac only thing, and so you've got to install macOS Catalina, and you need a compatible iPad using iPad OS 13. So go ahead and upgrade everything. The computers have to be 2016 or later, as we're seeing right here, so as long as you've got this stuff and an Apple Pencil, then you'll be ready to do. All right now, notice up here, we've got this AirPlay option. The next step it to either connect your iPad to your computer, so you can do that with the cable that came with your iPad, or you can have the two machines on the same network. In which case, you go up to this AirPlay item right here and you want to choose your iPad, mine happens to be called Deke's slate and then you probably want to mirror the Sidecar display. So that you're seeing the same thing of both screens. I'm going to go ahead and open the Sidecar preferences here so that you can see that we've got a sidebar in the Sidecar along with the touch bar. So currently the sidebar is appearing on the left side of the screen with the command key and all that stuff. I'm left handed so I'm going to switch it over to the right hand of the screen. And then you can see the touch bar along the bottom, the context-sensitive touch bar, which Photoshop uses by the way. And you'll be able to see it on your iPad even if you don't have a touch bar on your Mac. All right, now I'm going to go ahead and switch over to Photoshop. Now the thing about Photoshop is generally speaking, you'll need to make it go using your Apple Pencil or of course you can use the track pad on your computer, a mouse, or what have you. Now the first thing I want to do let's say, is select this manta ray and move it against this alternate background. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch over to the manta ray and I'll tap on the Select menu. Again, with my Apple Pencil. And I'll choose subject right there. And that will tell Photoshop to automatically select the manta ray for me. Kind of misses the tail so I'm going to go ahead and switch to the quick selection tool. And by the way, you can switch between tools from this little keyboard icon down here in the bottom right corner of the screen. Notice if I tap on it, I bring up the keyboard, if I tap the M key, I'll switch over to the rectangular marque tool. The W key switches me to the quick selection tool and so forth. For some reason, I can't get the command key over there in the right side of the screen now to work along with the letters. So I'm not able to take advantage of any keyboard shortcuts, not reliably anyway. Now, if the keyboard gets in the way of the icon, notice that it's sitting in front of it, then you can drag its bar to a different location like so. And then you can dismiss the keyboard by tapping on the keyboard icon. All right now with the small brush, I am going to do a two-finger pinch outward in order to zoom in. That zoomed in on the right part of the image however. So I'll press the space bar on my computer and then I'll go ahead and drag this guy with Apple Pencil once again. I just want to make sure I'm in there so that I can see what I'm doing. And you may notice that my auto-enhanced check box is on up here in the horizontal options bar at the top of the screen. So that way I'll get a better quality selection. I have selected too much however. So notice on the right side of the screen for me, probably the left side for you. We have modifier keys. So we've got command, option, control and then shift. I'm going to press and hold the option key and then I'll just paint that extra stuff away so that I've only selected the tail and nothing more. Now we have a couple of gestures that allow you to copy and paste. And so if you want to copy something, you do a three-finger drag inward. So that's a three-finger drag inward and now I'll switch over to my foothills image and to paste, you do a three-finger pinch outward. At which point, I not only zoomed in but I did paste the manta. Notice it's on a new layer over there in a layers panel. And so I'll just go ahead and double click on its current name on the Mac this time around, it's just easier. And I will call this guy Manta so that the layer has a name. And then I'll press command zero to zoom out like so. So I can better see what I'm doing. All right, now I want to scale this guy so I'll tap on the Edit menu, again with my Apple Pencil. And then I'll tap the free transform command. Then now I'll drag on the W value up here in order to scrub it downward like so. And then I'll drag this guy up at which point he's too high. I'm trying to get him now to snap to the edges. But actually this looks pretty good. I might just nudge him around from the keyboard of my actual computer here. And then if I'm happy with what I'm seeing, I'll go ahead and zoom in to make sure and maybe just drag this guy a little bit over to the right. And then I'll press the return key in order to accept that change. All right, now I'm want him to better match his background so I'll tap the FX icon down here at the bottom of the layers panel. For some reason, I can't tap an actual layer affect so I'm going to have to do that with my track pad here. Or of course, you could use a mouse. So I'll go ahead and choose outer glow. Then these are the settings I'm looking for, fairly over the top. Notice I've got a size value of 90 pixels and then I'll pass these up at 100 percent. After which point, I'm going to colorize this guy with a color overlay affect. And notice I set the color to a kind of shade of green. And I was able to eye drop that green down here in the grassy area like so. And it's easier to do that with a track pad as opposed to the Apple Pencil. So I'm just go ahead and accept that color and notice that I set the blend mode to hue. You could go with color if you want something more over the top, I figure hue's good. At which point I'll press the return key in order to accept those changes. All right, so this is all very well and good but the real power of having your iPad set up as a Sidecar is that you can use it as a pressure-sensitive painting device. And so I'm going to create a new layer. And so notice down here at the bottom of the screen, I have a little diamond with a plus sign next to it. It's job is to let you create a new layer inside Photoshop. So I'm going to tap that guy in order to bring up the new layer dialog box. And I'm going to call this layer, signature, because I'm so darn proud of this artwork that I want to sign it. And then I'll press the return key in order to create that new layer. And now, I'll switch to the brush tool by tapping on the keyboard icon, which for me is in the bottom-right corner of the screen. And then I'll tap the B key in order to switch to the brush tool. And I want to paint with white. So I'll tap the D key to instate the default foreground colors. Which makes the foreground color black and then I'll tap the X key in order to swap 'em. So that the foreground color is white. All right, now I'll tap the keyboard icon in order to hide it. And I want to show you something here. I'll tap the star icon in the bottom-left corner in order to switch to brushes. Notice that button right there, and that's going to allow me to adjust the size value. So I'll go ahead and tap on size. And I'll take this guy up to something like, 53 pixels is just fine. And then I'll hide that slider. And I'll tap the hardness button and I'll take this guy all the way up if it'll let me here. This one's a little hard to use sometimes to 100 percent, like so. All right, now I'll tap the X key to hide that guy too. And it'll go ahead and begin brushing inside Photoshop. And let's say I just hate what I'm doing so far, this is terribly ugly. In that case, you can access your multiple undoes by tapping this undo icon in the bottom-right corner of the screen. And then you can just drag back and forth in order to make these various elements disappear. And then I must have dragged the other direction because it reappeared. And I'll try to be more careful this time around. And notice that I'm painting pretty lightly so that I'm getting thinner strokes and then if I press more heavily, I will get thicker results as we're seeing here. And trying to do a little better job than I did before and I'll go ahead and create an underline as well. And now let's go ahead and give it a drop shadow. By clicking of the FX icon at the bottom of the layers panel and manually choosing drop shadow using the track pad on my computer. And I'm going to leave the color set to black. I'll take the opacity value up to 100 percent I like an angle value of 130 degrees but I'm going to change both the distance and size values to 10 pixels at which point I'll press the return key to accept that change. And that my friends is how you turn your iPad into a pressure-sensitive drawing device using the new Sidecar feature which is part of Mac OS Catalina. Now I know a lot of you have invested in walk-on products, including the Cintiq or the Mobile Studio Pro, both of which let you draw directly on the screen. And Wacom offers dedicated driver software that let's you adjust the stylist sensitivity across all applications. And so if you want my real opinion, given my experience with Sidecar so far, the Apple Pencil in particular feels a little hypersensitive especially in Photoshop. But what am I doing a product review? Sidecar is cool technology, especially if you're a rabid Apple fan as so many designers are, including me. iPads are eye candy. Which is why next week we descend further down the mobile rabbit hole as we explore Fresco, which is the latest, greatest, createst app from Adobe. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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