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I'm very proficient in photoshop, but I took a course in high school to learn it. I've kept up with it for the past 10 years, so a lot of things I've just picked up. It really depends what you want to do and how complicated it is.

I'm a graphic designer, but I'm about 94% self-taught. Originally at least. I mostly work in InDesign and Illustrator, though I use Photoshop every day for touching up photos, some web design, etc. I'm wondering what you mean by manipulating photos? Do you mean, you want to touch up photos, remove blemishes in skin/the background, edit in textures? Or do you mean, you have photographs of say, Charlie and Olive separate, and you'd like to blend them together so they're in the same photo? (This is how I hear a lot of people use "photo manipulations.") Or something else altogether? If you're looking to do basic photo touch ups, I definitely think you can teach yourself (assuming you have an eye for what looks "normal"). But if you're looking to do pretty complicated tasks, you may want to take a class. I have found Photoshop easy to teach myself. However, sometimes when I was figuring it out on my own, I didn't use the simplest/easiest/most accurate way of doing it.

You may want to see if you can go to a couple seminars. The biggest univserity in my state has eight hour "boot camps" for Adobe programs. They are hands on (which I find necessary, but not everyone does) and some focus on very specific tasks and others are more broad.

@twodoghouse: I second looking at local universities to see if they have classes. The university in my town does similar "bootcamp" style classes for photoshop, illustrator, excel, and other popular computer software packages. They are free for students, and cost a minimal amount (like $50 or less) for non-students.

I'm goodadit. Once you learn clone stamp tool, it's all over...

I'm a graphic designer... I use photoshop quite often and I swear I learn something new in that program weekly, and I've been using it for about 12 years!

Depends on what you want to do, but you could take an adult Ed class and learn the basics --- or do online tutorials to learn... I think Linda.com does online photoshop classes too.

It's definitely learnable, and the more you use it, the easier it gets!

I do it as a hobby. I taught myself, have an SLR and learned some photography basics, my SIL is a professional photographer though and she has taught me a few things.

Photoshop REALLY helps I think- Photoshop actions are my friend!!

It has been a few years of accumulating knowledge, however I never tried to learn a lot in a short amount of time.

Once you get some basic manual settings on the camera established it just takes some practice. I found this blog post particularly helpful: http://www.kevinandamanda.com/whatsnew/tutorials/photography-tutorial-a-quick-guide-to-understanding-your-digital-slr-camera.html

As long as you can take a decent picture - I think knowing photoshop is what makes the photo.

I've done a few weddings and would post those photos but I don't have them on this computer.

Here is a before and after of some photos I've done: