Adobe Photoshop Advice Please

shopaholicsan

I am trying to get suitable Adobe photoshop software on my laptop at home. My daughter is going to be using it for A-Level Photography and also will be teaching herself the basics before she starts the course. I am confused by all the different software and prices. I am also aware after searching on this thread that computer memory could be an issue. The laptop only has 512mB RAM. Can anyone help me decide which one would be best for this and the best place to buy it at a reasonable price?
Thanks

espresso

Are you sure that she actually needs Adobe PhotoShop? You can download a free PhotoShop equivalent program called The Gimp from here.

amcluesent

Adobe Photoshop CS2 is the most powerful. You should be able to get it on academic license for sensible money such as from Amazon

cwoodham

I use Adobe Photoshop Elements 3. The latest version is 5. Elements is a cut down version of the full Photoshop CS2 and would probably be fine for starting off.
Does everything I need. However my biggest annoyance with Elements is the time it takes to load. About 34 seconds to load the Organiser and another 36 seconds to load the Editor. And that's with a dual core processor. Still, once its loaded its fine. Perhaps the later versions have improved on the load up time.

Astaroth

Elements certainly is good for the home user but probably lacks the depth of tools for someone needing to do serious work.

GIMP is what I use on my laptop as for some reason it wont run Photoshop. In all honest it is probably almost as good as photoshop for the serious user as its very good and has all the low level tools. The 2 problems she would face is that 1) whilst it has the same low level tools they do have different names and/ or controls within them so no easy "doing what teacher says" 2) Lacks some of the high level controls for "1 click operation" - for a student it is probably almost a good thing as they have to learn what goes on behind the scenes (and the pros I have known dont use the higher level controls in photoshop either) but it does mean it has a stepper learning curve and again cant just do what teacher says. There are extra filters that can be added in but I dont know how good these are.

Photoshop - it is the industry standard, it is the best that I have used and is what I use on my desktop. If it is what they will be taught on then I would certainly give this the first priority and see if there is a student licence or if the school has an extended licence etc.

Mercenary

My OH and I did a digital photographic course last year and we were using Photoshop Elements 2.
The tutor said that he rated the v2 better than v3 as it was basically the same thing, but not as complicated as the tarted-up v3 and without the Adobe album feature (which we didn't want anyway).

We were advised to buy the v2 for each of us from Ebay as there are a lot of people who get these sort of programmes as a freebie disc when they buy PCs, scanners or printers. We found one each for around £6.

So try Ebay, but make sure you're buying a pukka version (not a copy) from a pukka seller who doesn't want the freebie or who has upgraded recently.

My DD uses The GIMP and says it's great! I would too if I hadn't already got PShop Elements 2.

f1charlie

Just as an aside, Serif do a product called PhotoPlus which is (from what I have read and seen - I'm no expert!) pretty close to Photoshop. The latest version is 11 but you can pick up version 10 pretty cheap on eBay.