After many classes and one on one help etc. I still find PS very baffling and cumbersome and part of that has been because of all the graphics art creative stuff.
I feel your pain Ken! However, maybe you have been approaching it in the wrong way. Classes and one to ones probably don't deal with what
you need and will often follow pre-set programs. Forget about the graphics and art stuff. I am a philistine when it come to art. Photoshop is only cumbersome because you don't know the layout and how to use what you need. I know a guy who has a lot of photography knowledge. He is trying to become a PS expert
before he has even started to do any editing!!! Needless to say, he will never do it. I'd say that 95% of us only scratch the surface of what PS is capable of.
When I went digital after close on 50 years of using film, I did not have a clue on what was possible - or how to go about it. Back then Photoshop Elements was way out of my grasp as was Rawshooter - the company Adobe bought to make it into Lightroom.
For me the key was
to only learn what I needed to get by. This was initially the basic global adjustments such as contrast, levels, brightness, sharpening and resizing. Back then I was only using jpgs. I knew that RAW was better but could not get my head round the RAW concept over jpgs. Such was my ignorance about digital. Gradually I grew in confidence at this level, helped along with tutorials I found in books first, then more increasingly on line. My book selection method was to go to a book store (fat chance now in the UK!) and look at a few books for something
I knew how to do. When I found a book that kind of matched the way I thought I figured that it was the one to get. I found that my elderly PS books were still useful even when PS had been updated several times because the things I was doing back then did not change in the updates, so the books served me well for a long time.
So using my key, I gradually expanded my skills. Yes there were many trial and errors on the way but with digital it did not matter, unlike wet processing. I quickly learnt to make a new layer copy if I was doing work where if I went wrong I could ditch the working layer and not loose much of my efforts.
Now, I'm no Lightroom and Photoshop expert by a long stretch, but I am a confident user and
still use my key. I now find that I can pick things up fairly easily - and if I don't use a technique for a while I forget it, but getting it back is easier too.
I think you are a confident camera user, but you had to start somewhere, didn't you? So how did you go about that? I guess lots of trial and error, learning from books, maybe on line too, learning from mistakes updating your kit when it did not do what you wanted to do, finding out what would be the best new kit to get..... sound familiar?