Using Elements 10 to work on part of a photo

There are a lot of basic learning resources available directly from the Home Screen.  You can ask a simple question and ramble through the carousel of cards that link to various options:

And as I said before, take a look at the Guided Edits:

You can download a free trial of Elements 2022.  One of its major features that was not available in Elements 10 is the Guided Edits.  The Guided Edits provide step-by-step instructions to perform basic edits as well as some more sophisticated effects.

The Welcome screen also has a box that asks "What do you want to do today."  You can give a plain English response and you will be directed to a number of learning/tutorial instructions.

Login ( set up a free account) and borrow this puppy!

https://archive.org/details/photoshopelement0000brun

Matthew, you say you are a beginner, but you are using a program that is more than 10 years old.  So finding tutorials directed to that version is a little bit of a challenge.  There have been many advances in Elements over the past 10 years that would make the task a lot easier. There are usually a number of different ways that a task like this can be accomplished (particularly in later versions), and astrophotography is very difficult to get good results.  But if you are unable to upgrade your software, here are a couple of suggestions. 

You have already brightened the sky using Windows Photos.  I really couldn't get a better result using Elements 10.  So, I have replaced the original sky with the brightened sky, using the following method:

• Open both images in the Editor
• Select the brightened sky image and drag and drop the original over it.
• The brightened sky image that you provided needed to be resized to cover the original.
• You now have an image with two layers.
• Select the top (original) layer in the layers panel and select Layer Mask>Reveal All from the Layers menu (or click on the Layer Mask Icon in the Layers panel),  A white mask icon will appear in the layers panel.
• Press D, then X.   This will make the color palette change to a black foreground color.
• Press B to open the Brush tool.  You can change the size of the brush to a fairly large one.  (Use the square bracket keys [  ] to change the size of the brush up and down)
• Click on the white mask icon in the Layers panel.
• Start brushing over the sky area in the image and the brightened sky from the lower panel will show through to the top.  If you make a mistake painting over the house or tree, press the X key to change the paint color to white and paint over that area again.  (White reveals, Black conceals.)

Here is how the end result should appear:

If you are observant, you will see that the mask area in my screenshot contains areas of white (the house), black (the sky) and also grey (around the tree area).  This was because I also brightened the original a little and the tree came out too bright.  By painting over the mask with a grey color, I was able to selectively lower the brightness of the tree.

The bottom line is that for astrophotography, it is probably best to bracket the exposure of your photos and they can be blended in Elements.  Elements 2022 has improved quite a bit over the years since version 10 was released but there are still limits to what it can accomplish with difficult tasks like this.   But there are certainly some newer and improved tools that would work better than Elements 10.