Photoshop tutelage needed.

i learned by just doing a lot of tutorials and messing around, try good-tutorials.com there are a lot on there

 

There's a lot of good stuff here.

http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorials/Photoshop/1

 

Tinker with it. Over and over.

When I had CS2 I only used a few of the menus. Try using the one with the simplest options (Saturation, Contrast, etc). Fiddle with those and see what you make of it. After all, you can always Ctrl-Z (undo).

After you become familiarized with those, branch off into some of the other things, just trial and error.

Good luck, & show us what you come up with!

 

Best way to learn is to simply use it. Figure out what it is you want to do, then tinker, research, and finagle everything until it looks right. You'll sift out the proper techniques after a while. 5-6 years maybe.

My advice as someone who's been using PS and other graphics programs professionally for almost 10 years is that if there's one thing you should focus on more than anything else, it's selection techniques. Just about everything you do will be based on selecting a region of the image you're working on, so learn that first and the rest will fall into place. When to use the pen tool, quickmask, etc... key stuff here. Save the liquifier and lens flare filters for later... or never

-R

 

I started learning by making wallpapers for the computers. You can start from scratch with a blank file, and build from there. It allows you to be creative while learning the in's and out's of the program. With a photo you're kinda restricted because you don't wanna screw anything up, but with a wallpaper you can do whatever you want. It's a great way to learn how the filters and fx work, get used to the tools, etc.

From there you'll feel more comfortable tinkering with photos, graphics, etc.

 

play with it.

it's a self-taught thing..anything i've ever read in books or tutorials never sticks, because I usually only ever need the tutorial or book for that single instance. Everything else is done the way I taught myself to do it..it may not be the most efficient way at times, but it's just how I do it.

I've been using Photoshop since ver 2.5 (the first ever version of photoshop for windows), and even thought we're at CS3 (ver 11.0) there' STILL so much i don't know about it.