Learning Photoshop?

Lightroom is a great photo editing program

I watched these videos in high school and its pretty much how I learned, took an image processing class in college as well but this series pretty much taught me everything I needed to know, learn the basics and what all the tools do first because he moves quite quickly, but they're still very useful and get you into a good workflow habit.

Like other people have said, I definitely recommend Lightroom. For $299 too it's definitely worth it.
I personally use Lightroom for all my bulk editing stuff. Like, say I go to my mountain and take about 500 good shots. I can import them straight into my Lightroom catalog and just go through them easily one right after another. I use photoshop too, but for all my specific needs. Like, if I take a great shot that I love, I'll fine tune it until it's perfect in photoshop. I love Lightroom though and use it for almost everything anyways. I mean, unless I'm doing HDR (rare for me) then I pretty much stick with lightroom. Well, of course I use photoshop for "photoshopping" Tanner Talls head onto stuff but not too much else. Haha.
It looks like Lightroom is on sale on amazon for about $140:

http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-65064073-Photoshop-Lightroom-3/dp/B003739DVY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328707812&sr=8-1
Not too bad, if you ask me.