Rather a Story

Hi all!

I have a very savvy flist, so I'm hoping you can help me. I have managed, with much sweating and cursing and use of CTRL-Z, to create a nice square image in GIMP that I'd like to use as an album cover for a book recording I'm making for my mother for Christmas.

I did a test run on Friday to try to print it... and it printed out about three times too big to be a good CD cover. I thought I got the settings right in GIMP, but apparently I thought wrong. Can anyone out there tell me what I should be doing?

Okay.

So I have a not-so-legal copy of Photoshop CS4 on my computer. Shh, don't tell anyone, 'kay?

Anyway, I have discovered, much to my chagrin, that I understand diddlysquat about how it's supposed to work. No, seriously. I can't cut and paste shapes, I can't even find a fill too. It's embarrassing just how badly I suck at figuring this out, and usually after I futz around in a program for a while I can usually make out the basics. Hell, I once figured out an entire image editing software that was in Portuguese, and I don't even speak the language.

Dear flist, help a girl out. Are there good tutorials out there? Preferably with screencaps and plain language, or at least language that will explain to me what all the technical terms mean? I have this shiny toy, and I really want to play with it!

Thanks in advance!