Photoshop is my preferred choice for creating posters, manipulating artwork, scanning artwork into, creating business cards, saving images for the website...the list is endless and I use this program multiple times daily. I wouldn't be without it.
Photoshop is very versatile and although I have been using the program fro over 7 or 8 years, I don't think you could really know everything about it as there is so much to it! My advice to my students is to usually just set yourself a few tasks to start with and find out how to do them, rather than wading in at the deep end reading all the help files. Start off with something simple like drawing with a paint brush and playing around with the filters ...something fun!
The main use for my own work is to scan photos into the computers and create composites for my pet portraits clients and so if they have two or more dogs they wish to be added into the painting, I create a composite so that both I and the client will be able to see visually what the portrait will look like. An example of this is above. This is a commission from the client and I placed the dogs onto a new piece of paper so that each dog was on a separate layer. I then erased the background on each photo, turned the image into grayscale (without flattening it) and you can see here it looks almost like a pencil drawing...not quite but almost! This enables me to see visually what it could possibly look like as a pencil drawing.
This isn't to be confused with artists who create artwork in photoshop and print them out on canvas for the client. i only prepare the images just like preparatory sketches and then work from them as reference when I am physically painting on my canvas in the traditional sense.
Of course what I do is a very niche area, this is only for my needs, and perhaps the type of things you will be doing in photoshop will be completely different.
There are many digital artists out there who do create wonderful artwork using photoshop along with a wacom tablet and a pen. In my opinion a real digital artists actually paints using a tablet and pen (a wacom for instance) and using reference photos actually paint with brushes onto the paper to create an image. The artists who just use straight filters, that in my opinion isn't art. My favorite digital artists are Matt painters and if you have a chance to research them on the Internet you will be in awe of what they do. They basically paint scene for films, and you have probably seen thousands on screen and never known that they were paintings as they are so cleverly done. My favorite Matt painter is Craig Mullins and his website is Goodbrush.com
