Learning Photoshop CS6

Purchased a copy of CS6 awhile back and finally installed it once I got my computer straightened out. Any suggestions on a path to start learning the software. Any particular book that is good for a beginner to start on. I see all the videos on youtube, but where do I start. Have a bunch of raw files from my 60D on the computer here to play with. Guess what I am trying to say is I just want suggestions.

I am "old school". It irritates the hell out of me that software no longer comes with written manuals. A video is not particularly helpful when one has to switch back and forth between screens. I want the instructions/tutorial in paper form where I can have it on my desk and refer to it step by step.

I bought three CS6 books. They are different in approach, but all are good: "Teach Yourself Visually-Adobe Photoshop CS6" (Wooldridge), "Top 100 Simplified Tips and Tricks" (Kent), and "Photoshop CS6 the missing manual" (Snider).

Now, I just need photos that are worthy of Photoshop editing.

I've always struggled trying to learn software from books...I'd recommend a Lynda.com subscription to systematically learn the basics. Beyond that, any advanced features you can learn on the fly as you need it. It can seem intimidating but you just have to dive in.

https://blogs.adobe.co​m …/video-tutorials-adobe-tv

For CS6 you get a library. I have Photo Shop Elements for that you get books.I'm old but I'm learning
beats the hell out of a darkroom.

Lots of good resources out there; IMO this one is essential and a great place to start:

http://www.amazon.com/​gp/aw/d/024052604X

Good book suggestions!

I'm an "old school book learner" as well. But, as a serious "heads up", any "comprehensive" book covering Photoshop CS6 will be huge. I had to special-order one when I upgraded from CS2 to CS3, and it was huge, and seriously it was little-used.

Something to bear in mind is that much of Photoshop CSx is geared toward "graphics artists" rather than photographers, and for this reason much of Photoshop documentation is bloated and pretty useless for us photographers who don't want to do "fancy graphics".

Of course, the "users guides" would have Indexes (which I use) and the Help docs have Search, which I use. In fact, Photoshop Help (and Lightroom Help) are needed, to get a quick "how to" guide.

But I do value "primers" that are in fact oriented toward photographers, such as the Evening book that has been mentioned.

And then many people here have gotten a lot of good from the video "providers" of tutorials. Lynda.com is possibly the best -- they offer both a short "essentials" series and then tons of other tutorials. Another provider to look into is Scott Kelby and his KelbyTraining.com site. He also has a pretty comprehensive set of video tutorials authored by well-known experts.

As someone said, Photoshop books can, well, fill a lot of "library space". I don't grab books for PS willy-nilly. A quick glance up at 4 PHotoshop books sitting on a shelf above me includes a classic book "Layers" by Matt Kloskowski, another classic "Skin" by Lee Varis, dealing with portrait photography/processing​, "Photoshop CS3 for Nature Photographers" by Ellen Anon and Tim Grey, and then a huge workbook/reference book from the NAPP Photoshop World Las Vegas conference -- it's from '07, but still chock full of goodies...

In other words, instead of grabbing a bunch of "comprehensive" Photoshop "manuals", I went for "specialized" books that focused on a particular field of Photography (although somewhere I have one of the Martin Evening "primers")...

Lynda.com is great. I had a free month of access through my local photo meet-up group. I found it to be easy to follow, informative, and the instructor wasn't a monotone drone.

lynda.com (Deke McClelland, Chris Orwig and others) or http://tv.adobe.com/
Books: Deke McClelland, Martin Evening, Katrin Eismann.

Thanks everyone for all the answers. Once the holidays are over, will have lots of time to start the learning process.

Does Adobe still offer a choice of Bonus when you purchase Photoshop? They used to and one of the choices was a 30 day trial of Lynda.com

www.kelbytraining.com
www.photoshopuser.com

Both involve a fee but offer good information

I would just open it and start playing around. I've never had the fortitude to personally read through tutorials or watch videos because my attention span was way lower than I would like to admit. I started on Photoshop 8 and i've had a good amount of success figuring it out on my own since then. It's very possible to not read huge books. It just looks daunting because there's so much stuff. Just start doing.

Try finagling with Adjustment Layers.. those are huge because they are non-destructive edits (fancy way of saying the adjustments you make aren't permanent). Everything in Photoshop starts with your Layers panel. It's like taking a blank sheet of paper and putting stickers on it, with each sticker being a separate layer. From there you can decide to color each individual sticker, change the contrast, tear the stickers off and put some of them upside down, etc.

If you can, get a trial version of Lightroom 4 and start by tooling around in there to get an understanding of what curves/contrast/white balance in post production do, then the actual Photoshop might be much less intimidating as time goes on. In my opinion, Photoshop is so open-ended and is such a capable program for so many different practices that it ends up looking more complex than it is (due to the wide amount of tools at your disposal).

Personally I only touch these when editing:
Adjustment Layers (Contrast, levels, exposure, curves)
Layer Styles
Blending Options
Content Aware Fill with the Lasso tool
New Layer
Layer Masking

auto-clicker wrote in post #15330338
https://blogs.adobe.co​m …/video-tutorials-adobe-tv

this is awesome man, thanks!

Very few people actually 'learn Photoshop'. It's just an enormous and powerful program. I've been using Photoshop for ~ 17 years.. even before they had layers, and I still probably only know about 50% of it.

I think a better approach is to learn how to do the things you need to do. Do you need to sharpen, or color correct, or remove elements of a picture, etc.. eventually learning all those processes will tie together, and you'll improve your understanding of the program.

As mentioned, Lynda.com and even Youtube offer a fair amount of useful tutorials.