Photoshop CS3/5 or Elements 8?

[dabigginger]

I'm thinking about getting Photoshop as one of the presents for my Mrs for Christmas. Having never used the program, I'm looking for a bit of advice really. This will be her first time using something like this and she'll be using it on an amateur level just to bring out the best in her pictures (she likes taking pictures of wildlife, including her pet fish etc).

What I'm wondering, would I be best off diving in and getting her CS3 or CS5, or is this going to be a bit too complex for her? However, at the same time, I don't want to get something like Elements and find her getting annoyed it's lacking the features she wants once she gets to grips with it. Our computer is running on Windows XP, so we'll have to avoid the Vista/7 versions.

Next up, is our 3 year old Dell laptop going to be up to the job? It has a Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 2gb RAM and an Intel integrated gfx chipset. The minimum spec shown for CS3 was 512Mb RAM and a Pentium 4 CPU, but I'm thinking that might be a bit unrealistic to do anything decent.

[Hetzer]

I can post you a fully functional copy of CS3 Master Collection (Extended) if you like. It's got everything inc the sink.
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"There's the horizon! Ride hard, ride fast and cut down all who stand in your way!"

[dabigginger]

Thanks for the offer, but I like to keep it legit. Thanks anyway!

[doggone]

I was running CS8 on a 512ram laptop, much better with twice that though.
Appreciate you are thinking of it as a gift but I honestly prefer free www.gimp.org for a lot of things.

One of the extreme annoyances with my version of photoshop is if you want to adjust curves or whatever the box with the adjustment line covers half the image.
In gimp you can just drag it to one side so you can see what you are changing.

[Misc]

She'd get by with Photoshop 7. Been using it for years. Can add loads of different filters/features.

Used it with XP on a low end system.

[Stevie GooGs]

I used Photoshop CS4 and also lightroom.
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