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.