CMYK Conversion Problems

[BAW]

I am on a rather tight timeline this weekend, and could not find your book to buy but did spend $20 to download the PowerTools set. I currently own the full Photoshop 6.0 for OS 9, and have successfully used it on a Christmas Card project the last two years. But I want to be able to use Photoshop Elements 3 for this & other projects like it so that I can finally do Photoshop effects using OS X.

I have 42 photos I need to convert to 300 dpi, adjust color, etc., crop and then convert to CMYK to embed in a PDF file a printer will use to print the cards using a 4-color offset press. I am not a Photoshop expert but have gotten by pretty well in the past with my OS 9 version. Since I don't have access to your book I am feeling kind of lost about the simple process of converting an RGB image to a CMYK image, the way I used to do in the regular Photoshop 6.0.

I have found all of your effects in the Styles & Effects area. No problem with that. But I would like to know which one of the CMYK effects to use to convert from RGB to CMYK as a single image, to have the same effect as if I selected CMYK Color under the Mode submenu under the Image menu of the full Photoshop. I am not looking for color separations, the printer will handle that off of the final PDF file. I have tried a bunch of the CMYK Effects but keep running into error messages such as "Cyan (Magenta, etc.) can't be accessed at this time."

Don't know when you will see this post, hopefully soon. I am grateful to now have such powerful tools available inside PE3 for Mac and need to find your book to read to understand how they work and how to use them. But this weekend I need to produce a single repetitive result as quickly and accurately as possible.

Thanks very much for your help.

P.S. I could not understand the key combination you suggest for rebuilding the settings in PE3. There are only the Command, Option, Control & Shift keys on the Mac keyboard so that your suggestion to "rebuild the settings, hold down the Command+Option+Shift/Ctrl+Alt+Shift keys on the keyboard immediately after restarting the Elements program" doesn't make sense to me. I also read on one of your help files that came with the download that you don't really need to rebuild these settings. Would still appreciate knowing exactly which keys to press to activate the rebuild if needed on a Mac. Thanks.