Adventures in Photoshop Elements

Daniel got me Photoshop Elements for Mother's Day, and I'm so excited to begin learning how to use it!  Unless there's a test, I'm not good at learning stuff.  And Photoshop is not particularly intuitive.  So I've hired a tutor to help me learn, and my first lesson is next week.  My own experiments with Photoshop have had mixed results.  Daniel's helped me figure a few things out, but I still find it really complicated.  One of the most frustrating things for me is that there are multiple free, online editing sites that are so user-friendly it's ridiculous.  So part of me is really perplexed as to why Photoshop, which is not free, is so difficult and complicated.  I think once I get a few basic things down, it won't seem so complicated and will start to feel intuitive.

Here I was experimenting with different ways of altering the background so that the photo looks more like a studio-portrait, but there are some serious issues with this image (the blurriness of her body's outline, the "shadow" around her hair and flower).  I'm not sure how to fix these problems yet.  But someday soon I will, and I can't wait!