What you need is a program that will do layers -- I'm sure that Elements will do it (I used it for years, but have been doing PS for a long time now). You adjust the basic photograph in any way you want to and then you make a new layer for each texture you in effect put on top of the picture. Here's an example (made small) of what a texture looks like ("Apple Blush" from Flypaper Textures):
You open the texture, move it on top of the picture (in a new layer), and then use one of the blending modes to get the effect you want (Overlay, Multiply, Color Burn, etc.) and you adjust the opacity and so on. Then you might use the brush tool to brush away some of the texture from parts of the picture -- I didn't do it in the ships pic but I often do when the picture is of flowers or something like that. It's a process of experimentation -- I probably used three or four different textures and blending modes on the ships pic. In this pic, I brushed away much of the texture from the roses:
The textures can be like fabric, or stone, or whatever. There are a lot of pretty crude textures floating around, but I like the ones that are pretty subtly done. If you also use some of the PS filters like Paint Daubs, you can get something that really exits the world of photography and starts looking pretty much like a painting -- I did use filters with the ships pic.