Today I’m announcing a new contest from Colortrails. In an effort to help me grow my web presence here at Colortrails.com, on Vimeo.com, and especially on Twitter, I thought it would be fun to ask my followers to help me spread the word between now and the holidays, and see what we can accomplish together. In return, I’m offering up a nice prize to several lucky followers.

The Goal:

To grow @Colortrails (on Twitter) to a fan-base of 1000 photography- and Photoshop-crazy followers, by January 1, 2011. From today, that’s about 215 new followers each month, or roughly 50 new followers each week. Not that tough to find 50 digital enthusiasts across the globe each week, if we work together! Of course, my part of the bargain is to keep posting up useful tutorials, articles and other cool stuff here at Colortrails.com, at TipSquirrel.com, on Vimeo.com (a great place to showcase your art — accounts are free!), and on Twitter.com. That, and give away some fun prizes! We can build a great online community; I hope you’ll join us and if you’ve got friends and family who love the digital arts too, let them know about it.

The Criteria:

To qualify for the prize drawing at the end of each month (starting September 30, 2010), just follow me @Colortrails, and RT a couple of your favorite posts each week throughout the contest period. The more you help get the word out, the more likely we are to meet The Goal each month. Assuming good progress has been made and we’re reasonably close * to our goal of 215 new followers each month, I will choose the winner(s) that month at random.

* This judgement will be at my sole discretion. Colortrails is a business; to justify giving products away, there has to be a win for everyone, obviously. If we rock these goals, a total of 7 winners will be chosen between now and January 1, 2011.

Learn Key Techniques for Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3

The Prizes:

7 lucky winners will receive a FREE copy of Adobe Digital Imaging How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques for Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3, and ACR6.

This book is designed for beginner and intermediate levels, and covers a wide range of topics from importing, organizing and developing your raw files in Lightroom 3 and ACR6, to perfecting them in different ways using Photoshop CS5, including all of the most important new features like Content-Aware Fill, Merge to HDR Pro, Puppet Warp, and others.

My hope is that it will be a great “quick reference” for anyone needing to understand the core techniques in a digital photography workflow, without having to read through a huge book.

I hope you’ll join us! Thanks for dropping by. -Dan