I don't have Elements so maybe I need to get that and figure out some work-arounds on my own to put in PSE tut. As for you, you could use the Magic Wand tool to select big black chunks and delete those. The smaller stuff will be much more difficult to magic wand and delete. What most people do is skip these few steps in favor of the Threshhold tool (Image-Adjustments-Threshhold). What I prefer is to use Image-Adjustments-Brightness/Contrast...set the contrast all the way up and move the brightness down until you get something that you like. Before you do any image adjustments, duplicate the layer that you're working on so that if something doesn't come out right you can just delete the whole layer and come back.