“The Classroom in a Book series is by far the best training material on the market. In addition to the lesson files, the companion DVD will feature 2 hours of free video tutorials from Adobe Photoshop CS6: Learn by Video by Adobe Press and video2brain, a great added value! In addition to learning the key elements of the Photoshop interface, this completely revised CS6 edition covers new features, including precise cropping with multiple overlays, expanded content-aware toolkit with skin tone-aware selections and masking, three new blur effects, re-engineered design tools, adaptive Wide Angle adjustments, improved Camera Raw engine, improved auto corrections, Background Save and Auto-recovery, modernized user interface, intuitive video enhancements, simplified 3D interface, improved editing speed with real-time results, and more.

The 14 project-based lessons in this book show readers step-by-step the key techniques for working in Photoshop CS6 and how to manipulate images, edit motion-based content, and create image composites. Hope this helps.Creative professionals seeking the fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn Adobe Photoshop CS6 choose Adobe Photoshop CS6 Classroom in a Book from the Adobe Creative Team at Adobe Press. The problem with the beginners is they jump to the filters and get struck there. There are lot of tutorials out there to help you master these filters.

You can also play with them and try use different filters to achieve advanced effects. Next play with 'Image' Adjustments, try changing a photos color, saturation, hue, brightness, contrast, levels, etc to familiarise with photo manipulation techniques. By the time you understand how to use these two, you are already an intermediate level user for Photoshop. Once you master these tools, you can look at the concept of layers, blending modes with different layers etc. Just ignore all other tools in the toolbox, as you can master them later.

90+ % of time I either use Rectangular marquee tool, Move, Polygonal Lasso tool. As a professional I only use Rectangular Marquee tool (short cut M) most of the times.

Amazon photoshop cs6