The best way to ensure that professionals are using your software is to get users hooked when they’re young. That’s why most software packages have an educational discount, and why Adobe has just introduced a plugin that turns learning Photoshop into a game.
It’s not a terribly fun game — at least if you’re not into fixing red eye or changing someone’s hair colour — but LevelUp does let users earn points and badges for mastering various post-processing techniques like whitening someone’s teeth, smoothing skin tones, or close cropping a subject. Exciting, right? Besides working your way towards a job slaving over a Wacom tablet all day, the badges and points you earn get you entered into drawings for Adobe Creative Cloud memberships and gift cards from Amazon. But it’s only running until July 15th, so boot up your cracked copy of Photoshop and get re-touching. [Adobe via John Nack on Adobe]