New
#481
Well Athene has exceptionally covered all of this, but I thought I might as well throw my opinion in there.
When I first started using Photoshop I had absolutely no idea what I was doing! I hadn't bought the program at this stage, this was at school. I began by simply fiddling around a bit and familiarising myself with the interface. I spent quite a long time doing this, especially with all of the filters. What I would recommend is that you open up and old photo of yours in Photoshop, then click Filters > Filter Gallery. This will bring up a window where you can see what all of the filters do in just a few clicks. To be honest I don't use these as much as I should, but they're good to know. Then move onto the rest of the filters which can be found under Filters (surprise surprise ) These are much more useful when sigging, the blurs for example are brilliant. Play with them until you get bored - it'll be a surprisingly long time! Another great one is the liquify tool, Filters > Liquify, it's great for fire and water effects.
Once you're more confident with those, I would move onto the left side panel. Here's a great photo I've just found that shows all of the tools it contains:
Right click on the icon to show the other tools in that category. There's a lot to learn there!
Then there's all of the panels on the right to learn, the layers is the easiest to start off with:
Then there's the adjustments panel to learn, hover over the icons to see what they do. They're easy enough to work out:
The keyboard shortcuts make things a lot faster: Adobe Photoshop CS5 Keyboard Shortcuts
Then you're all set to hit the tutorials:
50 Stunning Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials - Smashing Magazine
30 Beautiful Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials
The Best 80 Photoshop Text Effects on the Web
140+ High Quality Categorized Photoshop Text Effects Tutorials - tripwire magazine
65+ Smoking Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials | Tutorials | instantShift
22 Best Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials
100 Creative Photoshop Text Effects Tutorials | designrfix.com
50 Creative Photoshop Text Effects | Psdtuts+
Brushes: Google
Textures: Google
Patterns: Google
Fonts: dafont.com
And last of all, have fun!
Excellent post, Tom !! A most valuable post for a photoshop beginner I can imagine. It is a resource!
Here's my effort, look bad compared to the competition
Large
Attachment 179813
For applying
Attachment 179814