Colours

Ahh, cool. I want to learn to use even simple "advanced" programs, but the few times i've tried, the layers and the masks and whatever had me in over my head. I simply couldn't make it all play together. I need a "picture editing for dumbies" class to open up.

On account that GIMP is free, albeit frustrating to work with, I recommend DeviantART for tutorials. They're hit-and-miss as all tutorials are, but it's good to have one place you know where to look before starting on Google. If you try to order them by popularity and "all time", it should be easier to find the better ones. Even ones that don't show anything productive are useful just to get you familiar with what tools are where, how they work and what to do with them. If you come across anything over your head just ignore it and press on, it will all slot in place later.

I figured that, as with most things in life, the trick is learning the ideas, concepts and terms - and how to manipulate within that world, then you can more or less work in any program. but first you need to figure out layers and masking, regardless of the program.

I DL'ed (fully legally of course, mr. Watchman) a copy of photoshop in early 2000... and the help was massive even then. but maybe they are more user friendly now.

There's a trend to video tutorials now due to more impressive technology allowing it to work, but those fall into two categories. Ones that are completely pointless, with bad sound, low resolution images and people going "oh, I'll just click here and here and here and just watch this". This gets you nowhere, if you're not enthused or at least learning within 10-15 seconds of the video don't waste your time. Then you have the ones that actually work. Andrew Kramer's After Effects tutorials being the stand out best tutorials made for any program ever. If you can find the right thing for you, it's pretty much Instant Expert.

Gimp tutorial type thing

If you use Firefox, you will be going to love this add-on. It serves me well since Firefox 0.8.

i use chrome. but i have GOT to move to ff.