I once spent three months and no little cost on a course at our local adult education facility that purportedly would teach us everything we needed to know about Photoshop. Unfortunately, it was the first year the course had run and it wasn’t entirely up to snuff. We had a few total n00bs who wanted to know how to deal with red-eye, a few people who wanted to learn how to get rid of obtrusive backgrounds and others who thought they could get a digital facelift for their passport photo.
The tutor didn’t have a scheme of work and so each session would disintegrate into nothing more than each of us messing around with our own photos and trying to ask questions while the n00bs got all the attention and the tutor repeated himself over and over trying to get them up the learning curve.
It was occasionally fun, but I’d already learned some of the very basic stuff we covered myself at home, and the tutor seemed more keen on showing those of us with any kind of photography skills just how good his own glamour photography was rather than teaching us anything solid. I did learn from him that quality glass (lenses) are much more important than megapixels. He showed us A3 prints taken with a 3Mpx camera that were superb, crisp and clear, and with no pixellated jagged edges. You certainly don’t get magazine cover quality A3 prints even with a 12Mpx compact camera.
Anyway, there are lots of free Photoshop tutorials on the web these days and a few that cost a few dollars but package everything together aimed specifically at those wanting to eradicate red-eye, smooth over wrinkles. You can download a neat Photoshop tutorial package that claims to be able to teach you all the basics here for a whole lot less than the cost of my adult ed course. (Disclosure: Imaging Storm will receive a small percentage of the cost of this package, so you’d be supporting the site if you buy the course, I hope it’s as good as its creator claims).