Advice on HP Omen and other laptop touchpads.

[Adamski]

Hello Photoshop Gurus! I am a fairly experienced PS user and I have been using PS on my old but still impressive HP Pavilion dv7. I have done a lot of high magnification editing almost to individual pixel level and the touchpad is almost perfect as you can roll your finger for precise cursor control. As my laptop is getting old I bought a new HP laptop, but it had a multi-function touchpad with the multi-finger gestures and the pinch zoom etc. This kind of touchpad does not work anywhere near as well with PS as the one on my dv7. Luckily the keyboard developed a fault and I was able to get a full refund!

I still need a new laptop an would like to know if the new HP laptops with the traditional touchpads (with real buttons) are as good with PS as my dv7. Does anyone have an HP Omen? This would be a possibility. This could do huge edits with it's nice specs! I am open to suggestions on other brands of laptop, however HP seem to be hanging onto the lead in the reviews. There is no such thing as laptop hire I have checked, so I can't go round hiring laptops to find this stuff out! There is no information about detailed touchpad specifications on laptops, I have checked! HP customer service is a bad experience, I have been there!

Real life experience from real PS users is the only answer. Any help much appreciated.

 

[IamSam]

Hello and welcome.

My advice based on experience is to buy the best laptop you can afford and add a graphics tablet. Touchpads are more or less useless for Ps work.

 

[pauloalex_98]

Hello and welcome.

My advice based on experience is to buy the best laptop you can afford and add a graphics tablet. Touchpads are more or less useless for Ps work.

I definetly agree with IamSam. If you're using Illustrator a touchpad can be handy but with Photoshop it is useless.

 

[Adamski]

Thanks for the advice, I am currently looking at some graphics tablets, any recommendations would be great. As I said before, I am fairly experienced with PS but have no experience with graphics tablets. I mostly use PS for photo editing.

 

[gedstar]

Hi
Most people like myself use a Wacom tablet, they're not cheap though

https://www.amazon.com/Wacom-Digital-Graphic-Drawing-PTH660/dp/B07PPQH867?th=1

Some people have issues with Pen Pressure not working with Photoshop, the way around this is to create a text file called PSUserConfig.txt and add the following lines to the file
# Use WinTab
UseSystemStylus 0

Then save the file to this location C:\Users\yourname\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop 2020\Adobe Photoshop 2020 Settings
Then in the Wacom tablet settings turn off "Use Windows Ink

 

[MentosCubing]

Touchpads, I have found, are very bad for Photoshop, and HP in particular makes truly awful ones (though mine, admittedly, is not the type you're talking about; it has no real buttons and you click on the trackpad itself). You need to click and drag a lot, and touchpads make it very hard to maintain precise control while doing so.

I recently upgraded to a Wacom Bamboo Pen CTL-470 tablet and a Logitech G402 eight-button mouse (grand total of less than $50 USD).

Using a mouse, you can precisely control a lot of things, and panning around the image is particularly easy (just hold down your middle click and drag around, regardless of what tool you have selected, and you can even zoom in/out by scrolling up and down with the middle click pressed). My eight-button mouse also allows me to undo and redo without touching my keyboard.
I still think that a HP laptop can be great for photo editing. I use one myself and I've never had a problem with it. It just needs to have enough USB ports to support a mouse and tablet for it to really shine.