Most of us could really use some help with our computer skills, right? I’ve been wanting to take a refresher course on the basics of PhotoShop, so I began searching the net to see what I could find. Several people recommended taking a course at the local university, but I didn’t relish the snail’s pace of two hours per week over a nine-month course and it was very expensive.

There are lots of DVD-based training tools out there. These are definitely an advantage if you plan to use them multiple times or even share them with a friend, but they are pricey and you cannot always be confident of the quality until they arrive in your mailbox.

Here was my list of requirements:

• I wanted to “test drive” the training course before making a financial commitment.
• The course needed to be inexpensive.
• I wanted to start from scratch, as if I had never seen or used PhotoShop.
• I was looking for training on various versions of PhotoShop, since I owned PhotoShop CS (quite old) but was considering an upgrade to CS2 or even the latest version, CS3.
• The training had to be “on demand” and video-based, which meant either an online course or a DVD version. I had no interest in a written curriculum, because of the visual nature of digital photography and PhotoShop image manipulation.
• Once I learned the basics, I really wanted something that would allow me to jump from one topic to the other, so I could go straight to those things that interested me most. PhotoShop has so many features that I will never use and didn’t want to bother learning.
• If I liked the course, did the curriculum provider offer other courses that I might be interested in?

After searching the net for several days, I found a site that offered complete access to over 22,000 Quicktime video tutorials on 324 different topics. Lynda.com has eight different courses on PhotoShop alone: 56.5 hours on PhotoShop CS, nearly 103 hours for CS2, and almost 76 hours of CS3 training. The lessons were conveniently broken down into manageable, bite-sized pieces, ranging from 2 minutes to 15 minutes each. And if I learned everything about PhotoShop, there were courses on website design, learning to blog, mastering really technical stuff like CSS or HTML or Flash programming, and an unbelievable list of software-specific courses like DreamWeaver, Microsoft Office, Cold Fusion, Final Cut, and FileMaker Pro.

Here’s the unbelievable part: unlimited access to the entire online learning library is only $25.00 per month or $250.00 per year. There is a premium subscription for $375 if you want to download exercise files for the applications that use them. I couldn’t believe it! By the way, I am not part of any sort of affiliate program where I earn money if you click on a link to this amazing website: I don’t get anything for recommending it to you other than the satisfaction of pointing my friends toward a really cool resource. I signed up for the monthly plan, since I am hoping to get most of my training accomplished in a month, maybe two months at the most.

By the way, you can preview every course. For example, the PhotoShop CS Essential Training course offers nearly an hour’s preview—the first nine lessons—of the 10.25 hours total training, so you can see what you’re getting before you subscribe to the site. I think that’s really great and it shows the tremendous confidence in their training products. I really hope you can get some use out of this tip!