There are a number of ways to create a sepia tone effect in Photoshop. This one is my personal favorite. It uses a twist on a method of B&W conversion. What I like about this technique is that is is fast and easy and you have a lot of control over the result.

Here's a quick tip on how to straighten a photo with Adobe Camera Raw.

Start with a photograph that needs some straightening. Click on the Straighten Tool icon. You can also press the "A" key, which is the ACR short-cut key for the Straighten Tool.

I've seen a lot of threads on flickr! and other sites asking about giving photographs an aged look. There are a number of ways to simulate an old photograph. Some are quick and easy. The problem with quick and easy: it tends to look artificial.

I'm going to produce a video on this topic in the coming days. Some people like video tutorials. Some prefer written tips and tutorials. (I like either, when they're well done.) This is a topic that generates a lot of interest, so here's a written demonstration of the forthcoming video tutorial.

Sometimes it advantageous to replace a channel in Photoshop. Below is an HDR photo in Photomatix, saved and ready to load into Photoshop. Three exposures were used to make the HDR photo. Notice the orange center. Hard not to, isn't it?!

The fact that Lightroom 2 uses the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) engine means that many tips work equally well for Lightroom 2 and for ACR 5. That's true here.

You can use Levels, Filters, and Layer Blending to give your images a soft focus look. The effect works best on images that have lighter image tones.

A popular question is, "How do I soften skin features like blemishes, freckles, and wrinkles?"

Want to tame out-of-gamut colors? You can use the Select|Color Range command and either Hue/Saturation or Vibrance to bring those out-of-gamut colors back in gamut.

The Photoshop CS4 Color Range command includes "Out of Gamut" as a selection option. You will see a mask where out-of-gamut colors are gray areas.

I posted a tip (Tame Out Of Gamut Colors) that demonstrated how to tame out-of-gamut colors in Photoshop CS4 with the Color Range command and a Vibrance layer. Three pieces of feedback came quickly to me:

• I did not explain about Proof Setup
• What about earlier versions of Photoshop?
• Will adjusting saturation by eye yield the same result as allowing the Adobe Color Engine (ACE) to handle out-of-gamut colors?

Adobe released an update to Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) this week. The new version is ACR 5.5. Updating a single application that uses ACR is easy. Just download the correct installer. But, what if you run multiple applications that use ACR. For example, I have Photoshop CS4 Extended Edition, Photoshop Elements 7.0, and Premiere Elements 7.0 on my machine. They all use ACR.

One option is to download each of the installers. They're not small. They can take a while to download.