Photoshop Elements gives you the choice of three different desktop modes. Let's take a quick look at each of the modes which you can access in the bar above the desktop. When you first install and open Photoshop Elements, it will be in the Quick mode, which has some tools on the left, and an Adjustments panel on the right to quickly fix photo problems. Since we don't have a photo open, the adjustments options are grayed out but they'll be available as soon as you open a photo.

Guided does what its name implies, it provides guided tutorials in various categories. Move your mouse across an image without clicking to see the before and after effect. Click to enter the tutorial, which we won't do right now. Besides basic tutorials, you also have color, black and white fun edits, special edits and Photo Merge. So this is a fun area to explore. But it's not something you'll use every day, like you will with the Expert mode. This is where you'll spend the majority of your time and the goal of this class is to help you get very comfortable working in the Expert mode.

The first time you click on Expert you may not see any panels on the right. But if you click on one of the icons in the lower right on the taskbar, a panel will pop up. Let's click on the Layers icon, which brings up the Layers panel. You can click on the Layers icon again to close it. But since we'll be working with layers in the Expert mode, I'll go ahead and click to open it. In another lesson we'll talk more about panels. But right now let's take a quick look at the other options along the top bar.

On the left, you have the Open menu. We'll go over that when we talk about opening photos and documents. On the right, you'll find the cloud storage icon. Once you install Adobe Photoshop Elements, you're entitled to 20 gigabytes of cloud storage. This gives you access to your saved photos across devices and all the changes are saved and synced to the cloud instantly. To find out more about that click Learn More. Once you have something to share in the cloud, you can click the share link to share it.

And finally we have the Create and Share menus. Click on the triangle, not just the button to open a menu. In create you'll see options for creating special projects. And Share is a fast way to share files on Twitter or Flickr. You can see there's a lot you can do with this amazing program. So where do you even start? Well, let me give you some advice. All these desktop modes and menus have their place. But to become a true expert, you need to get really comfortable with the Expert mode where your creativity is almost limitless. So that's what we'll do in the coming lessons.