Wacom Intuos Photo

£75, $100 www.wacom.com

Graphics tablets are seen as an essential piece of kit in most photographic studios, but the size and cost mean that they’re quite as popular outside the studio.

With the Intuos Photo, however, all that might be about to change. Retailing for just £75/$100, it’s the ideal solution for the home. It features many of the same multi-touch inputs as the larger professional version, but at a more manageable size and price, and an active work area of 152x82mm – more than enough to give you plenty of control and flexibility when editing your images. It’s also small, at just 210x170x10mm, which makes it easy to pop into a bag and transport.

The tablet can be used with or without the pen, and uses multi-touch finger gestures in a similar way to the screen on a mobile device. These are handy when editing images, as you’re able to zoom and edit with your fingers. The control these gestures gives can also be customised easily within the Wacom software.

For finer control the pen is required, and this offers 1024 levels of sensitivity, as well as nib-point accuracy. (This means the greater the pressure on the surface of the tablet, the more effect the pen will have, in much the same way as adjusting the opacity of a tool in Photoshop.)

The tablet is fully compatible with the majority of popular imaging apps, including Photoshop and Lightroom. It also ships with copies of PaintShop Pro X8 and AfterShot Pro.