Photoshop has always been a program that's intrigued me, but due to general lazieness and stupidity, I've never bothered to learn how to use it. 
 
But now that my school has given me a laptop full of Adobe programs I've decided to give it a shot. It's a pretty daunting undertaking for me but but hopefully I'll master it someday. I watched some tutorials on Youtube, a channel named Ch-Ch-CheckItsClan has some pretty useful tutorials. I also looked up how to change my language from Swedish to English since English is much more useful to me.

I found this on Youtube recently and I found it really entertaining and informative. It certainly shows the basics in a far funnier tutorial than I have ever seen before.
 
  YouTube - MyDamnChannel's Channel

"I found this on Youtube recently and I found it really entertaining and informative. It certainly shows the basics in a far funnier tutorial than I have ever seen before.
 
  YouTube - MyDamnChannel's Channel "

God speed sir!

One thing I use very often is layer > layer style. Go and change the boxes and stuff around, the settings and for example your text will have shadows, textures and all that good stuff. I sometimes color a drawing, then mess with this to create shadows which saves me time because it's a very lazy way of doing things.

" @rye256 said:

"I found this on Youtube recently and I found it really entertaining and informative. It certainly shows the basics in a far funnier tutorial than I have ever seen before.
 
  YouTube - MyDamnChannel's Channel "

I second that.The guy is just so damn funny. "

Photoshop has a hell of a learning curve but is incredibly powerful once you get to know what everything does and how it works. There is also more to it than layer effects and filters which is what most of the tutorials floating around the internet revolve around.

Let me teach you something: 
 
1. Select something using lasso tool or any other marking tool. 
2. Press F5 or go to edit->fill 
3. Select content aware and press ok 
4. Smudge any rough edges 
 
Boom, pure fucking magic. I use content aware for everything, it's a really powerful tool which will take you far. I think the hardest part of learning photoshop is remembering to be in the right layers and such. People get very frustrated when shit doesn't work when the solution is as simple as clicking a layer. Speaking of layers, USE THEM. Basically everything should have it's own layer. If your layer list is getting long put the layers into folders. Also give the layers DESCRIPTIVE NAMES so that you know what's on the layer so you don't have to sift through a thousand layers to find that little detail.  
  
And remember not to be too picky with details in your images, while you may think those 3 pixels ruin the picture and you just can't stop thinking about them, someone else will likely not even notice. Of course being precise and trying to make everything as perfect as possible is good, but sometimes you just can't get every pixel right in a timely manner. It's sometimes better to leave it be at that point instead of spending weeks trying to remove a small fault. 
 
And if you have the full CS5 suite, learn flash and actionscripting. Flash is bloody awesome and learning it is great. It is even more challenging than photoshop but also very rewarding to learn.

i say look around the internet to learn a lot about photoshop. there are a lot of tutorials about stuff. also i found the help search function work a lot. if you search for layers it will give you like 50 different things about layers. 
 
here are some commands for quick changing, off the top of my head. it may take a second faster but still good to learn.
[   ] changes the brush sizes for things
CTRL / COMMAND, ALT, Z cancels the changes and  to undo more. 
CTRL/ COMMAND +  - zoom in and out of the image. 
CTRL/ COMMAND D deselects all. 
CTRL/ COMMAND A selects all. 
 
some useful information for quick things.

" Let me teach you something:  1. Select something using lasso tool or any other marking tool. 2. Press F5 or go to edit->fill 3. Select content aware and press ok 4. Smudge any rough edges  Boom, pure fucking magic.

What I've learned from the few lessons I've had in school about Photoshop is pretty much just ''Use layers''. 
So, yeah, now you know everything about Photoshop... (not really)

I use this site for tutorials myself. 
I've learned all kinds of stuff from there that I use almost every day

" I use this site for tutorials myself. I've learned all kinds of stuff from there that I use almost every day "

I really hate Photoshop, it really needs a good UI designer. It feels like it tries to break itself half the time.

" @ZeForgotten said:

" I use this site for tutorials myself. I've learned all kinds of stuff from there that I use almost every day "

Do you have some suggestions on what sorta stuff I should learn in Photoshop, what are some important things? I wanna learn how to effectively use it but I'm not quite sure what I should do "

My photoshop powers are truly great.