In April or May of 1990, I suffered the cost and got my first copy (version 1.0.7) to run on a Mac IIci with 8MB of RAM on a lovely Apple 13-inch color display.
Had to read the manual (RTFM), but it was actually quite good.
Sigh. Those were the days. I finally popped for a Photoshop license some years later after seeing what our professional graphics staff was able to do with it, and found Adobe's documentation daunting. By the time I started using Photoshop, it had gone well beyond being
just a photo editor. Fortunately, I discovered
Julieanne Kost's videos; I still rely on them to explain new or complex functionality.
Even more fortunately, Lightroom has matured to the point where I can accomplish almost all my post-processing with it. I still occasionally make a round-trip to Photoshop when I feel I have no recourse but to muck with the pixels, but nine times out of ten (and that probably understates the proportion) I can do what I want within Lightroom's raw workflow.
