Colours

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.