You should not be having the problems that you described. I have been running Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 on two different Macs, a G4 and G5, and it performs better on the Mac than on a high-end IBM graphics system running Windows XP Pro.

If you have the original Adobe installation CD, I would suggest trashing the complete installed copy on your HD including doing a search for all Photoshop Elements files like Preferences now installed and try re-installing.

Thanks so much. I figured something out. I was taking the PSE3 icon out of the HD and putting it on my desktop then opening it from there. When you do that you don't get all the features. I left it in my HD and opened it from there and everything works.
But I have one more question please.
I downloaded the RAW plugin from Adobe. Replaced the cameraRAW plugin with the new one (just as they instructed) and I cannot get camera RAW to work on Elements. When I try to open a RAW file it says this:
Could not complete your request because it is not the right kind of cocument" Do you know what that means or what I'm doing wrong?
Thanks in advance for your help.

With the Apple OS 10.3. operating system if you want desktop access to an application, you have to drag the application icon from HD/applications/ to the Dock not to the desktop.

With Elements 3.0 launched and running go to the menu bar and click on Photoshop Elements between the Apple icon and File, and in the drop-down menu click on Plugins which will give you a list that should include Camera Raw, click on that and you should get a Camera Raw splash screen window that provide the Version #. If it is not the version you installed, then the plug-in went somewhere else. do a Search - or possibly you have another version of Photoshop on your system? Also check the Adobe web site to be sure your make and model of digital camera is actually supported.

Thanks for the advice. Finally got it working

I have another question about Photoshop Elements 3.0: I've read in SB lately about how to convert color images to B&W. They all seem to indicate that the best way is through the channel mixer. I either am misunderstanding how to find it or I simply don't have one. I click on "New Adjustment Layer" and there isn't anything like that listed. Any ideas?

Probably with Elements 3 you will have to use HSL:
Enhance> Adjust Color> HSL and then completely desaturate the image with the Saturation skider.

There are ways to simulate channel mixing using layers. What you have to do is extract the channels/light components as separate layers and then use layer properties to make the channels mix. It is really like filtering out the components to display what are called Channels in Photoshop.

This may sound complicated, but it is actually not that bad, once you digest the concept and learn how to filter the components. For a simple way, try this:

1. Flatten your image.
2. Create a new layer, set the mode to multiply and fill with pure red (RGB: 255,0,0)
3. open Hue/Saturation, choose Red from the Edit list, and move the lightness slider all the way to the right.

There you have the red channel. With very little experimentation, you can owrk out the rest.

There are also ways to access features hidden in the Elements interface (e.g., curves, color balance, channel mixer, and more), but the only way I know to do this is with add-ons like those on my website and on the CD in my book.

Does that help? Do you need more?

You are correct there is not a channel mixer in elements 3. But you are not missing anything, with computer photo editing there are always parallel ways to do the same thing. The only reason to use channel mixing is to simulate the effect of making a B&W photo on silver-based film by applying a colored filter over the lens like a K2, G or red 25/29, most usually to darken blue skies in landscapes.

You can do that even better and very simply with Elements. Open your color image file and then use SaveAs and add BW to the filename. This assures that after making changes to the color you don't screw up and save them to your original.

Then on the menu bar go to Enhance/color/hue-saturation and open the dialogue. If you want the sky darker at the top of the window where it says Master, use the drop-down and select blue if you want the effect of a K2 or G filter. Then move the saturation slider to the right and the lightness slider below to the left, darkening the blues in the image, and click OK.

You can then either desaturate or make a Mode change from RGB to grayscale.

BTW if you do darken the blues in the image as much as the effect of using a red filter with B&W film (almost black skies), if there are trees and foliage in the scene they are also darkened some, so you can also under master open the green correction and using the bottom lightness slider, move it some to the right which will brighten the greens in the scene, correcting the effect of darkening the sky spilling over into trees and foliage loosing detail in your B&W conversion.

Quote:
The only reason to use channel mixing is to simulate the effect of making a B&W photo on silver-based film by applying a colored filter over the lens like a K2, G or red 25/29, most usually to darken blue skies in landscapes.

Actually this is not quite true. If you use RGB channels and layering to their advantage, the distinct information that color components carry can be used in ways far more complex than using a simple filter--especially if you do as I suggest and separate the channels/components into layers. The possibilities are nearly endless when combined with masking, as you can change the entire tonal composition. David's suggestion may work fine for every-day scenes, but you can make extraordinary and unexpected changes (not fitting to how a scene was originally perceieved) and even imitate other film qualities like infrared with creative of channel/component information. In less predictable scenes, like macro or flower photography, you can control adjustments in heavily creative ways. In other words, changes are not so limited..or black-and-white :-)

Simply changing an image to black-and-white by desaturation (either using Desaturate or a Mode change) is not something I would sugget to get the optimal quality from your result in almost any situation. Because you have data to mine from three distinct channels in RGB , a color component, and independent tone (CMYK is an option as well--and yes, you CAN make and save a CMYK file in Elements), simply desaturating is likely selling the conversion to black-and-white short. No matter what you have done to 'filter' the color image, you are not making the most of a conversion by following a set plan, or depending on a standard calculation. I have a favorite combination of components that I use as a place to start with black-and-white conversion, but I rarely leave it at that. Adobe includes the option of using Channel Mixer in Photoshop not because it is simply replicated by applying a filter (otherwise it would just be a simple filter), but because in some instances it is an advantage--and you can define that same advantage in Elements with the right techniques.