The Good Old Days

Two Months ago, I owned Photoshop CS5, had spent a ton of money on the software,
and couldn't do a damn thing with it - it almost made me cry.  But I persevered, bought
some Steve Caplin books, worked diligently through the examples and in three
months went from not being able to do anything to where I am now -but you do
have to actually do the examples, not just read it and think "OK I can do that" because
no, it won't work for you at first. And don't skip anything, if the example says you do
x and y happens, and it doesn't when you try it - you need to figure out what you are
doing wrong, not just give-up and go on to the next step.  The simple early exercises
took me several days to do things that now just take me a few minutes - you have to
figure out why you can't do what the books say you can do - it's tough to explain, but
once you get it, it starts being fun (yeh, it really sucks (in the negative way) at first.

The other point is you can't just do exercises - at some point early on, you need to start
using the software creatively -you still have to keep doing the exercises, this is additional
work - yes, your right friend - that sounds like it will take a lot of time to learn at first.
but the results can be impressive.

After about a month of exercises, I started doing some really simple captions (this would
have been three days work last month (Mid-October).  Nothing more than a background
layer, a picture I found on the internet, and a humorous caption I'd make up to go with it.
(I was going with a Fairy Tale theme on these)

So these were my first captions, back in "The Good Old Days" (last monh)
(basic captions like these are really, really simple  to make - but it does let you start to
use the software in a creative way):