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