Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom has now been officially released and is available for purchase in a number of online stores, including at Amazon where they have it for the introductory price of $197.99.

It’s already been quite popular and has gone straight to #7 on Amazon’s best selling software list. They’re also giving purchasers the opportunity to bundle it with a number of Lightroom books.

Adobe are promoting Lightroom as ‘the professional photographer’s essential toolbox, providing one easy application for managing, adjusting, and presenting large volumes of digital photographs so you can spend less time in front of the computer and more time behind the lens.’

It’s a piece of software that I’ve seen some great reviews of already and am keen to get my hands on. I’ve ordered a copy from Amazon which I’ll pick up when

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This tutorial with photoshop techniques for making your images ‘pop’ has been submitted by Elise Hennen from 28 Studios. Read more about Elise below.

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In this tutorial I will be demonstrating some quick, easy methods for adding drama and/or interest to your shots. As always, talk to me in the Post Processing Section of the Forums with any questions or comments. As far as I know, these methods should work for both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.

#1: blur/overlay

Duplicate your picture layer by dragging the layer to the ‘new’ icon in the layers palette (ctrl+j).

Apply a gaussian blur (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur…). Blur it enough that the detail disappears but the shapes mostly keep their form.

In the layers palette, change the blending mode from ‘Normal’ to ‘Overlay.’

If you look at the before and after, you can see that this method makes the light tones lighter and the dark tones darker while softening it a touch. Basically, it softly boosts the contrast. If you want a more dramatic effect, try changing the blending mode to ‘Vivid Light’ instead of ‘Overlay.’

Try it on all kinds of shots: portraits, nature shots, you name it. I use this method ALL the time. It works so well with everything!

#2: filter the background

The following photoshop tutorial was submitted by one of our Forum members – Floris who took an image that another of our forum members submitted and did some photoshopping on it (with permission of the other member). I hope you find it a useful tutorial.

We’ve all experienced it, maybe only once, maybe 10 or even 100 times:

Looking at a photograph you took, and think: “pity, wish I could change the colors a bit, or frame it a bit to the right.” Sometime you can go back an try another shot, but thats not always possible.

Fortunately, you actually can change these things. (although not always)

Here’s a tutorial on what can be changed in this photograph (shown below) with some post processing work. (note – this photo was submitted in the Critique My Shot section in the DPS forums by noamilee).

The photograph:

Things some people (like me) would like to change:

• Remove the date in the bottom right corner.
• Change the skin color. It’s a little blueish, it makes the blue eyes stand out less.
• Add some space left, maybe crop the right side a bit.

This all is quite easily to achieve, I made this tutorial as easy as possible, so I hope you can follow it.

Here’s where we’ll take this image in the post- post processing version:

This is the second part of 2 tutorials on making images have an antique feel with Photoshop. Part 1 is here. It’s been submitted by Elise Hennen from 28 Studios. Read more about Elise below.

All right, so you’ve got your picture looking a little older. Now, we’re going to give it some dimension and some abuse. You can do this with any picture. We’ll go from this to this:

First up, we’re going to give the picture scratches. Pick a brush that looks a little rough. Take it down to a size of two or so and make sure your foreground color is white. Create a new layer, and then go nuts. Draw little scratches all over it. It doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as it looks good and at least a little natural to you. Once your layer is relatively full, pull its opacity way down until the scratches are as subtle as you prefer. I wanted mine to be barely noticeable.

Put all of your existing layers into a new folder and call it something like “picture.” Then make your canvas a little larger than it is now – we want a white border around the picture. You can either go to Image > Canvas Size and resize it manually or use the crop tool. To use the crop tool (c), select the whole canvas using the tool. Then, holding down alt, resize the crop area to the size you want and hit enter.

This is the first part of 2 tutorials on making images have an antique feel with Photoshop. It’s been submitted by Elise Hennen from 28 Studios. Read more about Elise below.

I’m sure you’ve seen tutorials on fixing up old, damaged photos. Well, what about how to make them that way? I’ll be showing you how to antique a photo. Throughout my tutorial, I will put the keyboard shortcuts in parentheses after a command. Those shortcuts will be for Windows machines. For Mac shortcuts, alt=option and ctrl=command (apple key). So… on to the tutorial. First off, here’s the before (left) and after (right):

Once you’ve got your picture open in Photoshop, choose the crop tool (c). Old-timey pictures were often cropped to squares, so that’s our first step. Hold shift while you click and drag the crop tool to keep it square. Crop your picture a little bigger than you want it to be—we’ll need a little space around the edges for later.