Learning Photoshop

I want to teach myself how to use Photoshop! Any suggestions on how to accomplish this effectively. I am really tired of expressing my creativity through a 3 rd person! It is mentally so taxing!

In exchange for information I would PM some of my Mexican Taco Recipes!

There are probably a good number of free tutorials online. For example, this might be dated, but here's a link to one tutorial, which goes through the basics: http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pho.../bllps5out.htm. After that, it's probably just trial and error.

Then, if you have a specific issue, there are also online forums dedicated to working with Photoshop, like Adobe's official one: http://forums.adobe.com/community/photoshop. Good luck!

The best way to learn Photoshop is simply to use it for about 5 years

But yeah... there's a tutorial for almost everything. Almost anything you type into Google will give you a decent result.

e.g. I just searched "photoshop fire tutorial" and got these results:

Photoshop Fire Tutorial
25 Stunning Photoshop Fire & Explosion Tutorials
Photoshop Flame Tutorials
[photoshop] Fire Tutorial
Photoshop Tutorial: Fire Effect

Plus a lot of the time when searching tutorials you'll find loads of other interesting ones on the same websites... bookmark loads of them and do them in your spare time. Even if you don't need to do those exact things, they'll give you knowledge you can use in other places.

I found that the Scott Kelby Photoshop books were helpful for me. I think what worked for me is to just search online for examples and then really try to understand what each step is doing so that you can use the tools in different situations

Why Photoshop? It's great for some things, but if you're primarily interested in developing graphics for iPhone games, you may want to consider a vector graphics program such as Illustrator. For that, the Adobe Illustrator WOW! Book is the best resource for learning the software.

I'm curious, why do you feel Photoshop isn't suitable for iPhone games?

Thanks for all the help. I really appreciate the advice. Sorry for not responding sooner. We had a black out here for several hours.

Sorry, all I want to be able to do is send the ideas I have in my head to my developers.
Some quick way( besides drawing) so they can see the concept and layout of my ideas. Is there something simpler to get my message across than Photoshop?
They will still do the final images of the apps.

If you can't get your ideas across on paper then send your artists an email and explain in a few words what you want, and maybe point out some examples of similar art. Then trust them to come up with a concept and layout...

Personally I hate getting art direction from clients - it always seems to come in the form of a Word doc with some totally awesome stock art and fonts

If you've learnt to program, learning Photoshop is going to be a walk in the park.

I learnt it when I was 11 (I'm now 17), and picked it up fast then. It would help a lot if you already can draw with pencil and paper reasonably well.
If you want to create buttons etc... I would recommend Illustrator instead, its specifically for vector graphics.

As other posters said, look around for a few tutorials to teach you the basics, then just start messing around in there, and see what you come out with.

I'm just gonna point out that for designing iPhone apps(especially if you're a pixel perfect type person), you really can't do much better than Adobe Fireworks. The only people who don't like it are those who are really used to the Photoshop way of doing things, but if you're coming at it without Photoshop experience, it's great.

PS: These days I actually do almost all of my design+animation in Flash and then export everything to texture atlases.