Adobe

Talking to my sister who learned these programs:

She says that Photoshop 7 is a highly complex program, and the best advice would be to look for a community college or some other place where classes are taught concerning these type of programs.

She says that once you learn the program this way, that it is very easy to use and remember.

I don't really know: I usually work with PictureIT (a much simpler photo program) which I was able to teach myself.

Adobe photoshop.

It isn't really all that sophisticated. Once you learn the basics, you can do some pretty neat stuff. Things like composition, layers, alpha channels and rendered effects can do some really cool stuff and they're really not that hard to learn.

Start with draging and droping images on each other, this will create layers. Erase one layer, or two or so. Then do some weird stuff like move the layers all around.

There's no easy way to learn Photoshop. You just have to dive in and start playing around with it.

Here are some sites that might help get you started:

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/design/graphics/tutorials/tutorial1.html
http://user.fundy.net/morris/redirect.html
http://www.planetphotoshop.com/tutorials.html

Btw, if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. I've used Photoshop on a day-to-day basis for over 5 years now, so I consider myself pretty familiar with it. (Although, I still haven't got all of it figured out )

wow, thats an expensive gift! .

i like photoshop a lot, no one ever taught me, i just started playing around with it and...thats about it.

right now i have Photoshop Elements...which is most of photoshop, but it costs a whole lot less. Im not sure if it can do animations or not.

Photoshop is an awesome and extremely powerful program

If you REALLY want to dig deep into the program, buy a book. They're only like $20 and 2000 pages.....