Any Photoshoppers here?

tutorials better then messing around

I used both tutorials/mess...but mostly messed around with it.

Combo of the two. Tutorials are good for the basics and messing around is good once you know them.

tutorials is how you know what does what, messing around is how you get good.

A few tutorials got me started, and then messing around got me comfortable with the program

messing around :P

Hands on experience. It doesn't hurt to look to others for help from time to time though.

Tutorials then mess around
But for mechanical actions its better to learn yourself As you develop your own technique faster

What I mean with tutorials is to learn it from someone (school)

Yeah.. Mostly just messing around with it. I have a friend that taught me some advanced uses for the tools, but I mostly just clicked, alt-clicked, ctrl-clicked and mouse-wheeled. XD

When I started PhotoShopping, I first studied the online help sites by Adobe. Then I just started experiencing on my own. I look at a lot of different drawings and if I see a cool drawing, I usually save it on my computer for reference material. I learn drawing best by mimicing the style in other drawings and molding it to my liking.

Just do tutorials, you'll learn how to do certain things and you'll be able to use those things in order to create your own things.

Messing around with it.

paint is easyier. I can draw even a flower on it, i can give you an adviece for it, In upper panel you have litte squares, try to change colours there!!!. Photoshop sux, and its so expensive.

Both of those.

tutorials

I played with crap. I have a book, and I took a class in college, but I learned nothing from either of them.

Generally when "messing around" it helps to have a goal in mind though. I retained what I learned much better when I was searching for a way to complete a certain task, rather than just faffing about.

a mix of both sounds good for me!

Used gimp extensively before photoshop, annoying as hell, I knew what to do but all the buttons were in different places. :|
But yea, messing around helps but try and take on a youtube video tutorial, one at a time and perfect it.

lynda tutorials

Trial/error. Very little in way of tutorials. I spent two years using Elements 7 and Lightroom before I went on to CS5.

Specific stuff that I want to edit I google for... and I mess around here and there, learning myself what to do.

I use CS5 btw.

MS Paint for Win 3.1, Deluxe Paint II Enhanced for DOS, multitudes of versions of Jasc/Adobe, finally getting most comfortable with a combination of Paint Shop Pro 5.03 with Photoshop 6 and (for web) Fireworks and lots and lots and lots of 8bfs. PS 7 held a vague interest, but I mostly used PSP from then on up through v10 (aka X). Back to PS only because it's the industry standard (not due to lack of PSP features -- the opposite was true), and also trying Gimp and other freeware along the way. So since jumping ship from Jasc/Corel into the Adobe mass, I haven't been as adept and as I used to be. Tried Gimp more in earnest, but since the free-ish CS2 happened, I'm switching to PS again (trying to keep this comp legit...ish... ignore any tv shows you see over here!) -- there were definitely workflow and feature issues for me with Gimp that would not have been simply cured with time.
Also, for super-speed super-basic editing, I really like IrfanView -- starts up a hell of a lot faster than anything else and the shortcuts aren't too difficult to learn.

As for how I learned. Usually, it was... "okay... I want to do this thing in my head." And then I'd either look up tutorials or start trying things. If I tried things, and I wasn't happy with how it was coming out, I'd go to tutorials. However, for Deluxe Paint it was all trial and error -- even finding out what the tools even did (the perspective one was my last discovery, and it was awesome -- not always useful, but awesome).

First thing you should learn: LAYERS. LAYERS. And some more LAYERS. Seriously. Once you get this thing right, everything becomes so much easier. THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS

This tutorial ;)

Start with an older version..like CS2