The most common mistake in doing a portrait is to use an on-camera flash. While an on-camera flash will illuminate a subject well, the direct head-on light will wash out all the shadows making the face look flat. So our first rule is to have the key light off to the side of the subject’s face.

The whole color management process is getting pretty solid as printers are more accurate than ever and if you are using a known paper, you will get great prints. However, the weak link is the monitor, if you monitor isn’t displaying accurate color, if you tweak and adjust your image to match what you saw, when you print it, the colors will be off.

If you have been reading along lately, you know my battle with cheap lights and my discovery of the Lowel Omni light which totally changed my mind about trying to do things on the cheap. But did it? Yeah, I knew I should have just kept bidding away on eBay until I won another Lowel light, but hey, I have been trying to save you all some money along the way as well so I decided to try some of the cheapest of the high wattage lights available. The DynaPhos products from Amvona are some of the most affordable around, but…..are they any good?

As I have said before, I am a huge fan of saving money where ever and whenever you can…..if it makes sense. Let’s talk about lighting and why doing this on the cheap is so hard. Lightbulbs suck. There, I said it, plain and simple. I have tried probably 20 different lightbulbs this past year, bright white, daylight, you name it, if it claimed to be some form of daylight bulb, I have tried it. The end result of over $100 in light bulb purchases this year? Cheap daylight bulbs all over the house, and the purchase of decent studio lights. Why didn’t these lights work?

As you get more into photography and Photoshop, eventually you being to think you would like some extra control over what you are doing in Photoshop even if you cant quite put your finger on what that means. This is usually the time to plunk down a couple hundred bucks on a Wacom tablet and gain a whole new level of functionaly from the brush-based tools (brush, eraser, healing tools, etc) than you had with just a mouse.