Want to use photoshop elements to create textures

Duh.
Just bought Photoshop Elements.
Wasting my time on the most user-unfriendly software I have ever encountered.
I know it's not strictly SL, but can someone please
a) confirm that I can throw away Photoshop Bridge since, although it creates a database of images already present on my hard disc thanks to iPhoto, and helps to import images from a camera onto my hard disc, it offers no way of then opening the image into Photoshop Elements other than drilling down through the iPhoto structure (which I could do already, without any need for Photoshop Bridge?)!!!!
b) help me to access the 'How To' feature procedures which the manual suggests is a good way of starting, but which are NOT available in the 'How Tos' window in the top right hand quarter of the Photoshop workspace where they should be, this space being labelled 'How Tos' are not available'.

I'm aware that Photoshop is immensely sohpisticated and am prepared to put in the hard work, with various manuals, to learn the many techniques it offers. But why oh why is the very first step (opening a file!!!!) made so impenetrable?

Yes if you are using iPhoto to manage your images then Bridge will be a waste of time. You can set an external editor in iPhoto's preferences to call Photoshop (or whatever you like) for edit tasks.

This is something that goes more with PSE than full Photoshop, and I've never really used that feature. I do remember that it doesn't take long to reinstall PSE, so you may simply want to try that and see if everything becomes linked up correctly and works.

what kind of trouble are you having there? You can turn off the silly little welcome dialog and use the things that work in any other app (File|Open, drag the image file to PSE's dock icon, open with.... in Finder, etc.). Are you having some sort of other problem there?

(In my original posting I mentioned....b) help me to access the 'How To' feature procedures which the manual suggests is a good way of starting, but which are NOT available in the 'How Tos' window in the top right hand quarter of the Photoshop workspace where they should be, this space being labelled 'How Tos' are not available')

Many thanks for responding, Viktoria. The reason the 'How to' materials were not available is typical of the newbie-unfriendliness of Photoshop. Immediately on installing it I was offered the chance to upgrade from 4.0 to 4.1 which I did. Turns out Adobe had forgotten to make the 'how to' files available in the 4.1 folder. It was only after ages spent hunting in my Applications folder I noticed that they _were_ in the 4.0 folder but not in the new 4.1 folder Photoshop defaults to when opening files. Thousands of purchasers of Photoshop Elements 4.0 (the version current in the shops) must be having the same problem...

And now another user-unfriendly bit. I carefully use one of the 5 technically impressive ways of cropping an irregular area away from its background. I can see it in front of a white area that indicates the old background is no longer visible. I upload it into SL and what do I see? A white background, whereas what I wanted was see-through. The manual says to use alpha layers whatever they are but doesn't say how...