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Vaio Duo 11 pen pressure unsupported?

New Here ,
Oct 26, 2012 Oct 26, 2012

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Hi, I've just bought Sony Vaio Duo 11 i7 edition with Windows 8 Pro, but I found pen pressure isn't working on neither Photoshop CS5.0.4 or Photoshop Elements 10, while its pen pressure works on Fresh Paint and Artrage 3.5.5. Can anyone help?

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correct answers 1 Correct answer

Oct 26, 2012 Oct 26, 2012

If the driver isnt' reporting pressure correctly, then it won't work in Photoshop.

The other 2 apps you mention use a different API for pen pressure -- so probably the older API is broken in your driver.

You'll probably have to go through Sony for driver updates.

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Adobe
Oct 26, 2012 Oct 26, 2012

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If the driver isnt' reporting pressure correctly, then it won't work in Photoshop.

The other 2 apps you mention use a different API for pen pressure -- so probably the older API is broken in your driver.

You'll probably have to go through Sony for driver updates.

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New Here ,
Nov 18, 2012 Nov 18, 2012

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I am in a similar situation. Just got the Sony Vaio Duo 11 and the pressure sensitive pen is not working. I downloaded the Photoshop CS6 trial but it shows a warning when I try to set pen pressure in the brushes "Control by pen pressure requires a pressure sensitive tablet". I know the pen pressure works in Microsoft, Sony, and ArtRage products.

How can I check that "the pen is not reporting pressure correctly?" Surely if its working with all these other programs it is reporting it correctly?

Why does Photoshop not support the "differnt API?" It seems to be popular with other software developers?  

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LEGEND ,
Nov 18, 2012 Nov 18, 2012

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I would start with Sony, to determine if they have a newer, and better stylus driver.

Good luck,

Hunt

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New Here ,
Nov 18, 2012 Nov 18, 2012

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Sorry Bill, I forgot to mention that I checked the drivers first. The laptop was launched only a few weeks ago and everything on it is current. That's why I downloaded the CS6 trial so that everything would be up to date. Thanks for your suggestion.

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Nov 18, 2012 Nov 18, 2012

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If the driver was reporting pressure correctly - then it would be working in Photoshop.

Since it is not, then there is a problem with the driver.

You will need to talk to Sony or the vendor the made the pen hardware to get updated driver software.

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LEGEND ,
Nov 18, 2012 Nov 18, 2012

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As Chris Cox states, it is likely that their initial driver is not correct. I would definitely contact Sony, and inquire on a new driver.

In the case of Wacom, a tablet mfgr., they issue new, improved drivers, about every two months, to fix issues. I assume that Sony will do similar - at least I hope that they will.

Good luck,

Hunt

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New Here ,
Nov 19, 2012 Nov 19, 2012

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Thanks for the replies Chris and Bill. I spoke at length with Sony tech support who informed me that the driver is built into Windows 8 and provided by Microsoft. They said that the driver passed certification, is working properly, and does not require an update. They said its a problem with Adobe software since the pen pressure is working in other applications by other developers.

So it seems like I am in the familiar spot of being stuck between two companies pointing the blame at each other. I am really hoping to get to the bottom of this so I was wondering if you could answer my initial questions. I am a programmer so there is no need to dumb down details.

How can I check that the pen is reporting pressure correctly?  Surely if its working with all these other programs it is reporting correctly?

If it does use a different API then why does Photoshop not support it? It seems to be accepted by a number of other software developers?

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Nov 19, 2012 Nov 19, 2012

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The driver is not built into Windows -- each tablet/pressure device has it's own driver.

Also, even drivers that pass certification can have bugs and need updates.

Basically, Sony told you whatever they could to get you off the phone quickly and failed to do even basic investigation of the problem (which we've seen before).

No, just because the driver works with some programs does not mean that it is working correctly - some of the knockoff tablet vendors have really hacked drivers, and sometimes have specialty code for certain applications (why? we don't know).

The only way to get your system working is to get a working driver from Sony or the maker of your digitizer (who probably isn't part of Sony).

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New Here ,
Nov 20, 2012 Nov 20, 2012

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Looking in Device Manager in Windows 8 I found 4 devices under Human Interface Devices that make up the control interface for the touchscreen and pen. The composite device is listed with a hardware ID of

HID\VID_1B96&PID_0F00&REV_016

There are three child HI Compliant devices

HID\VID_1B96&PID_0F00&REV_016&Col1

HID\VID_1B96&PID_0F00&REV_016&Col2

HID\VID_1B96&PID_0F00&REV_016&Col3

All of these devices are using driver:

Provider: Microsoft

Date: 6/21/2009

Version: 6.2.9200.16384 (win8_rtm.120725-1247)

Files: hidclass.sys, hidparse.sys, hidusb.sys

So yes this device is using drivers built into Windows 8 and provided by Microsoft.

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New Here ,
Nov 20, 2012 Nov 20, 2012

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Digging a little deeper I have discovered (dun dun dunnnnnnn) that this is probably a N-trig Duosense device. So it seems I am not early to this party, like I first thought since this a brand new product, and it looks like N-trig, Microsoft, and Adobe have been dancing for a while.

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/374836 : N-Trig Tablet Not Recognized

http://forums.adobe.com/message/1667559 : Pen Pressure/Tilt in PS 7 when using a Tablet PC that uses N-Trig

http://forums.adobe.com/message/1660307 : Photoshop Pressure Doesn't work on Multitouch Tablet Pc's!

To summarize the above posts:

  • N-Trig does not use the WinTab API instead opting for the Microsoft Ink API. Adobe does not support the MS Ink API. So Adobe does not support any N-Trig device.
  • Adobe does not support MS Ink because: WinTab does everything correctly. MS Ink is incomplete, does not provide pen tilt, is not worth supporting. N-Trig has been uncooperative, does not respond, slow to create drivers.
  • N-trig does not support WinTab beacuse: WinTab is expensive to license, MS Ink is free, MS Ink does everything they need, MS may be an N-Trig investor.

Some points to consider:

  • I have found 23 laptops with N-trig pen tablets built in. Dell (9), Fujitsu (3), HP (3), Lenovo (5), Sharp (2), Toshiba (1). The majority of new Windows 8 tablets being launched right now use N-trig. N-Trig is also a major player on Android phones and tablets.
  • It appears that MS Ink has been around since 2003. It has been an option in XP & Win 7, and now native in Win 8. It now apparently supports pressure, tilt, and twist. I think most people will agree that it is now the standard for pen input.
  • I agree that MS has a track record of producing buggy code and lots of flip flopping. Windows 8 seems like a weak offering.

All of the posts above are from 2009 and reference CS4 products. It's now almost 3 years later and 2 major releases.

Does Adobe still not support MS Ink? If so why?

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New Here ,
Dec 08, 2012 Dec 08, 2012

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Dear pwr_usr!

I have exactly the same problem and was very happy to finall be able to use a pen for PS when I am on the go (I bought the Vaio Duo 11 as well).

Thank you very much for all these details! I also have enough technical background to understand it and I hate being treated as if I where just too stupid to understand the answer

However, now I am extremely angry at you Adobe guys! How can it be that you just ignore this issue for three years now!?!?!?

Aren't there any workarounds? I would even pay to get this problem out of the world!

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New Here ,
Dec 11, 2012 Dec 11, 2012

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Hi, one of the posters from the "N-Trig Tablet Not Recognized" thread there. I figured the matter was settled and I just needed to have some patience when Chris assured me that somebody was "working on Lemonade recipes" as it were, but I simply must interject after seeing HiDPI support getting completed today:

New Photoshop Features and Team Version Headline Major Update to Adobe Creative Cloud (the announcement)

New MacBook Pro Retina Display Support (blog post for background)

Really? Wikipedia says that the "MacBook Pro with Retina display" came out on June 11th, and the HiDPI announcement was released on December 11th. Six months exactly? That is seriously an amazing ability to make deadlines. (Everybody, take note - no matter what Adobe says, they can do things in a timely manner after all!)

Now, I have to point out that one of the things the blog post said was that a staggering 2,500 icons needed to be drawn, in addition to other engineering work. That is a ton to have to do, and it sounds like it was a modern-day miracle for it to be completed in such a short amount of time.

I think my next words must be so obvious that I could probably click "Post" right here and still get the message across anyway, but I'll spell it out: Three years? Your product teams could move mountains in six months for Apple users, but a digitizer that was ubiquitous in 2009 and is practically the Windows 8 flagship today couldn't be tackled in three years?

I can just imagine that poor lemonade-making engineer, sitting alone in a dark cubicle for three years, struggling and flailing to make N-Trig work with no luck at all, eventually developing clinical depression. (Don't worry, I'm not actually crazy; I assumed nobody was seriously working on the problem back then, although I did hope that work would eventually happen if people were patient and polite.)

To quote commenter Tom U from this article (it ranks highly in searches about the Adobe/N-Trig debacle, despite not actually being about that at all), "According to N-Trig it’s Adobe’s Problem, according to Adobe it’s N-Trig's problem. Neither one cares that it’s your problem. And they would both like to deny there IS a problem, so rest assured that nobody is fixing any problems." Couldn't have said it better myself.

-

For one last quote, I defer to the aforementioned Adobe blog post. "At Adobe we work hard to support the latest innovations. We will continue to release security patches, bug fixes and support new hardware changes, like HiDPI display support, to all of our customers outside of our regular development cycles just as we have always done."

Haha, okay guys. Whatever you say.

I said it three years ago, and apparently I have to say it again - if Adobe fixed this, they'd stand to gain some massively good PR with artists all over the world, who would love to buy a shiny new tablet for the holidays but feel they can't because of this issue.

I myself would love to buy an Adobe product this time around (seeing as all of my Adobe software is rather old and due for an upgrade), but other than the lack of Adobe support, the Duo 11 is perfect for me. I don't expect it to compare feature-wise in the least, but I'm willing to put up with IllustStudio if it means that I can get 90% of the functionality for 10% of the fuss. But I don't want to have to do that. Why compromise when you can have Adobe, a company which reliably makes some of the best software on the planet?

If anyone at Adobe can see which way the wind is blowing, it should quickly become obvious that (1) N-Trig is only going to keep growing; (2) N-Trig is not fixing it (not in any useful way - that makeshift Wintab patch of theirs was a joke); (3) there are a whole lot of people who really do believe Adobe will fix it, not because it's their problem to fix, but because Adobe is just so awesome a company that they take responsibility for things even when they don't have to. Other companies would kill to have that kind of customer loyalty, you know?

By the way, since the idea of having to cripple Photoshop's user experience to make way for N-Trig's defects was a sticking point last time, I'll take this moment to point out that we don't care if there's a few features missing, we just want it to work at all. Put an obnoxious warning every time the application loads that we're using a bad digitizer! Just let us have that option, pretty please.

We want that. We want to pay you for that. Please?

Just spend a few hours on the Internet and you'll find thousands of potential sales from people reluctantly making do with N-Trig compatible software, saying things like "Well, I guess ArtRage is kind of okay, but I wish I could be using Photoshop." What sane person would turn those sales down?

-

I get it. I really do get it, okay? Adobe's a relatively old company in tech terms, people are set in their ways, and the idea of sucking it up and doing something unpleasant like supporting a cheap lazy digitizer such as N-Trig would leave a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.

But please, I implore you, if any of you aren't snobbish about things like that - if there's any new blood in the company at all - please try to convince your managers that this would be a good idea. For us, the customers who want to like you but sometimes find it rather difficult, this would be a big deal.

You have the chance to be the "bigger man", as it were. That's it. Period. Doesn't matter if N-Trig should be handling it, or Microsoft, or anyone else. You can be the bigger people here. You can be the grown-ups, and gain a lot of relatively low-cost advertising as a result. Please actually consider it this time around, okay?

It seems crazy to me for Adobe to have spent so much sweat and blood creating versions of their software for iPad and Android tablets, while they've been actively fighting tooth and nail for a very long time (since before those platforms even existed!) to avoid fully supporting the Windows world's version of the same.

In summary, if you can do one thing, why not the other? If you can write entire software suites for new devices, why not this? If you can meticulously repaint 2,500 icons for a bunch of yuppies, why not this? It's not like the demand isn't there. It is, in droves. So please, carefully and seriously consider supporting N-Trig, and please pass the idea along to the proper brass instead of letting it die here on the forums.

Even though you don't have to, it would mean an awful lot to an ever-growing number of people if you did.

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New Here ,
Dec 12, 2012 Dec 12, 2012

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I would appreciate a response from Adobe as to whether my finding are correct and their plans (or lack there of) to resolving the situation. I see a lot of new tablet/convertible PCs hitting the market right now with N-trig digitizers.

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New Here ,
Dec 25, 2012 Dec 25, 2012

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I wouldn't expect Adobe staff to answer most of those findings, firstly because they've been dodging the issue for years (have you seen how cryptic their replies are?), and secondly because many of your bullet points have to do with the plans and products of other companies and therefore aren't really in the purview of an Adobe CSR to speak about.

As for outright saying "you guys smell of elderberries and we're never going to listen to you!", that's corporate suicide, so they wouldn't say that even if it were true. Instead of outright confirmation of their plans or lack thereof, you'd just hear silence. (Kinda like right now!)

Anyway, I answered some of your points myself in the post above:

• The Sony Vaio Duo 11 is an N-Trig device, yes.

• N-Trig released a small but mostly unusable driver for WinTab, as a token effort.

• Adobe will have to add the support themselves, since N-Trig is incompetent.

• Adobe claims they don't want to support MS Ink because it would increase Photoshop's code complexity and make it harder to maintain.

• Adobe insists that MS Ink is crippled and proprietary, and that WinTab is the only mainstream one. In reality, both are perfectly mainstream, but this is their excuse not to do anything.

• In the last few years, Adobe's released plenty of software for iOS and Android tablets. Considering that the capacitive styli (and/or fingers) used by artists on those platforms are about as lowbrow as you can get, Adobe may be more willing to entertain an "inferior" API now than they were in 2009.

All of this information is relatively easy to find, as in "top of the first page of results on Google" and/or official responses in the forum posts that have already been linked. So if you want corroboration on any of these points, plenty can be easily found.

Even though the facts are on our side, I'm not holding my breath. Adobe doesn't see this as "supporting a new wave of tablets" and all the good it would do, they're obsessed with the notion that MS Ink is unprofessional and would be a blight on their product. (Even though they seem to have no problem heaping mountains of gimmicky features into every new Photoshop iteration and releasing cheesy mobile apps.)

Suffice it to say, the people in charge here seem to be egomaniacal hypocrites, the sort who genuinely believe that we'd all be much happier if only we saw things their way. I'd be overjoyed to find out I was wrong, but all I've heard so far is stubborn pouting that consumer tablets aren't awesome enough to be worthy of the full version of Photoshop, all while racing at breakneck speed to support Apple's new ultra-proprietary Retina toys.

I'd be surprised if there were any more official replies to this thread, either. Once it's obvious that a thread about this has turned into (gasp!) people fact-checking the excuses and using logic to try to inspire change, the staff makes a hasty retreat.

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Explorer ,
Oct 21, 2013 Oct 21, 2013

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I just want to add myself to the list of people requesting an N trig driver for Photoshop and Illustrator.  As many people have pointed out here, the driver is not broken in fact it works extremely well detecting both pressure and angle on software that support it.  The hardware & driver has been widely accepted and implemented by many of the leading tablet manufacturers.  Supporting this driver would make your software more powerful last proprietary and would be highly appreciated by thousands of your users.

Thank you for your consideration.

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Explorer ,
Dec 01, 2013 Dec 01, 2013

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Just something to add to the conversation...

From Adobe TV: http://tv.adobe.com/watch/ask-the-adobe-ones/sony-vaio-duo-with-photoshop-cc-color-dancer/

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New Here ,
Dec 08, 2013 Dec 08, 2013

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I just watched this video and it looks like pressure is working on a Vaio (with Duo Sense 2 / N-Trig pen), or am I missing something? I finally chose to buy a Vaio Flip because the Sony guy at IFA said that Vaio machines would soon support pen pressure sensitivity in Adobe Photoshop. As far as I can see this has not been implimented yet, but does anyone know if Adobe has mentioned when this might become available. I have just started renting Photoshop CC so that I can have this functionality so I'm looking forward to seeing when it might become availble.

I wonder if it will just start working one day or whether I will have to enable something in Photoshops settings...

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Explorer ,
Dec 08, 2013 Dec 08, 2013

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Right.  My "addition to the conversation" was a bit of irony. 

I don't know how this video was done, my guess was that the artist was using a prototype that had different hardware...  and clearly was loving it.

We would be too if the the sony VAIO actually had the functionality depicted!

It is clear that a number of high-end tablet manufacturers do intend their devices to be used with pen-pressure sensativity in industry standard graphic software.  So as others in this thread have suggested, I believe full support for N-trig drivers will be forthcomming.  My expectation is that this will involve both updates for Adobe software and VAIO drivers and possibly firmware.  In the mean time patience and a good on-screen keyboard like Comfort Keys Pro will help you get as much brush functionality as possible out of your tablet.

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New Here ,
Dec 09, 2013 Dec 09, 2013

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According to the current sony website in relation to the current fall line (Press release is from september 2013) of the Vaio laptop series-

"In addition, VAIO is collaborating with Adobe to offer the best environment for creatives. Users will be able to enjoy Active Pen in the update of Adobe Illustrator® Creative Cloud and Adobe Photoshop® Creative Cloud (each sold separately)"

http://www.sony.com/SCA/company-news/press-releases/sony-electronics/2013/sony-introduces-fall-lineu...


I'm so relieved. I bought I was about to return my vaio flip that I'm in love with besides the lck of photoshop functionality. The disappointing thing is that this might be a creative cloud exclusive, or at the very least will be at first.

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New Here ,
Jan 07, 2014 Jan 07, 2014

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I know I'm a bit late in this conversation, but I tried exactly what the artist in the video was doing: the guy used the Smudge Tool and at a strength of about 80% or so, one can get a sort of tapered end to strokes. The video is pretty deceiving in that it's giving an illusion of what the stylus could do in PS... but on a better note, the N-Trig firmware has indeed been updated to support pressure in PS... only in the 32bit version though, ugh. Works in CC 32bit, but I want to use 64 bit because of the 16 Gig RAM for my Flip obviously... so its not exactly a win

http://esupport.sony.com/perl/swu-download.pl?upd_id=9079&SMB=YES

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New Here ,
Jan 07, 2014 Jan 07, 2014

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OMG! OMG!! OMG!!! Neo Viro you have made my day, week, month and maybe even year!!!!!!!

I tried the linked download you provided and sure enough it works in 32bit PhotoShop! Pen pressure and tilt!!!!

Does not work in 64bit as you said but this is a *major* step in the right direction. Gonna try other WinTab compatible software now.

Cannot thank you enough for your post. I stay up to date on VAIO updates and even check the Sony site frequently for new drivers just in case. This software package is not listed for my Duo 11 model number. Where did you find it?

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Explorer ,
Jan 08, 2014 Jan 08, 2014

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Yes frustrating that we have had to wait that long but 64bit will come, in

the mean time I am very impressed with this notebook.  I used it with

Premiere to edit a 2 angle multicam shoot of a friends wedding *got it done

in the car on the road trip home* running on battery!  Unbelievable!

Gabriel Armstrong Pass

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New Here ,
Jan 14, 2014 Jan 14, 2014

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Cool beans. I found it through a post on tablet forums for tabletpcreview. From what I've also read, n trig still doesnt support zbrush either and a slew of other wintab programs im reliant on as a digital artist... le sigh. Renders like a beast though.

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New Here ,
Jan 22, 2015 Jan 22, 2015

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I just spoke with Sony on the phone (they have my laptop in their store for fan repair) and they have point blank refused to update my software because they said it is the responsibility of Adobe Photoshop people to do this. What now?

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