[superdewa]

I just used Picasa for a few years.

Recently I got a copy of Photoshop Elements 6 and found it pretty confusing, and I found the automatic changes didn't offer much that I couldn't do in Picasa. Most of the tutorials I could find online for learning what I wanted to know were for full photoshop -- not elements alone.

So I took a bunch of books out of the library (The Missing Manual, Teach Yourself Visually, and Scott Kelby's book) and got a little out of them all. They were all good -- I ended up buying Scott Kelby's book for my own shelf, but you might find one of the others is more helpful.

I rarely see people recommend books for learning these programs, but they work well for me. There are books out there for all the more complex programs -- even the GIMP, which is free.