I think this *might be* appropriate with PT Photo Editor on GOTD...
I believe whatever you're doing there are all these levels from pure beginner to pro, whether you're into music or art or video or maybe using Office apps like Powerpoint &/or Word for work. And when you look at an area where you don't have a lot of experience, or maybe have the experience but haven't really pushed the envelope so-to-speak, it can seem hard to find out how the pros do it, and what tools they use. That applies to working with images & photos too, especially when it seems everyone's an expert, & every app claims to be all you need. Hopefully this will at least provide the smallest bit of a sort of road map.
If there's one point driven home after watching a week's worth of streaming video classes, it's that if you're shooting raw, unless you already have Photoshop, use Lightroom. If you have Photoshop, Lightroom is a nice extra to organize & manage your images -- if you don't have P/Shop, Lightroom does the same things as P/Shop's Camera Raw, but much more cheaply. That's not to say [or imply] all pros use Lightroom, but it kind of owns the $100 price range market -- you'll spend an awful lot more for a camera back, software etc. from a company like Phase One.
And if you want to use a camera rather than your cell, if at all possible buy a camera that shoots raw, even if that means a trade-off with fewer features. The why part is simple... Photos in raw format include all the data available -- jpeg photos don't, because your camera has already adjusted & filtered the image, tossing out all that original data. Straight out of your camera jpeg photos can look nicer than raw, because they have been processed, even though that in-camera processing means [a lot] less quality than you could manage yourself. Many cameras will save both at the same time so you have something to look at & something to edit.
Open a raw photo in Lightroom & the adjustments *seem* infinite, and, they're never permanent -- you can change your mind immediately or next year, tweaking or starting from scratch... Lightroom [and P/Shop's camera raw] save what are more-or-less scripts inside native format files, & while you see the results on-screen, they're only permanent in the photos you export as jpg or png etc. In practical terms it means that many if not most of those shots that didn't work out, will -- in most cases as long as your focus isn't completely off, you can make it a decent if not extraordinary photo.
Learning about Lightroom was a surprise -- everything I'd seen & read up to that point characterized Lightroom as just another cataloging app, albeit a pretty nice one. Maybe that's because even with all the adjustments & changes you can make in Lightroom, most people shoot jpg, where those adjustments just can't do nearly as much good. With a jpeg the highlights & shadows that you see are pretty much what data's there.
But, the classes were [supposed to be] on Photoshop...
I learned a Bunch of Photoshop nerd stuff, mostly explorations of features that are useful if/when you haven't come across or learned them before, along with the ways others use them, in case they do things differently than you. What might be more useful to more people is a brief look at what Photoshop is nowadays...
Will Photoshop do stuff that no other software can do? For the most part, No. Is software X, Y, or Z essentially the same? No. P/Shop is about speed, flexibility, & non-destructive editing, so you can change everything while re-doing nothing -- instructors frequently talked about spending seconds per photo. Today no one can count on quality being obvious, so when it's hard to get top dollar one common way to survive is to charge less, shoot & sell more. That's one direction that Adobe's moving -- editing in P/Shop can be FAST. Without non-destructive edits, & especially without layers, you spend a lot more time saving versions of your work, & of course using an older, saved version means re-doing everything that came afterwards.
There are 2 nerd tools for photos &/or images -- The GIMP & Photoshop. In some ways P/Shop comes out on top, in others The GIMP has the edge. There is high level software sold by companies like Phase One where there isn't near as much nerd factor IMHO. *My impression* is that the photo nerds experiment more, but the non-nerds *may* be more about art, a little bit more inclined to focus on the fine art market vs. commercial photography.
Comparing Photoshop to most, relatively inexpensive image editing apps is a lot like comparing the fullest version of Microsoft Office to cheaper software, e.g. like the office apps sold by Ashampoo. In this comparison The GIMP would loosely correspond to Libre Office. You can type simple, quick notes in Notepad as well as Word -- if all you do is resize an image, or maybe move the brightness slider to make it a bit lighter, Windows Paint is effectively the same as both P/Shop & The GIMP. OTOH if you're an expert in MS Office you know the Ashampoo stuff, regardless how capable it is, can't come close to matching the full MS Office feature set [otherwise no one would have ever bought it]. Same with Photoshop, & other top end photo software, compared to the much cheaper stuff.
If more limited software is all you want/need, there's no reason to make you feel badly about it. However any time someone claims app X, Y, or Z is just as good or similar or maybe even better than the recognized top dogs in whatever field, you don't have to be like the experts & laugh, but do take it with several grains of salt. If that person had & really knew & used whatever high end software, just checking out the cheap stuff would be rare. While I use the term cheaper more loosely than maybe I should, I don't mean to include The GIMP, which is a unique bit of code... find the right scripts & stuff on-line and you really can do stuff that's unique, but super fast & easy 'tis not.