from 12 to 14

Eileen,

My advice would be to download the trial version of Elements 14 and test the waters. In this way, you can make an informed decision, one based on your needs and interests. On the page below, scroll down to the Still Deciding? section.

www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-elements.html?promoid=DJDWS

This will give you an idea of the changes and new features in Elements 13.

Content-Aware Fill -- brought over from Photoshop.
Updated Crop tool -- it now includes suggestions for possible crops.
Refine Selection Brush tool -- for those difficult selections.
Photomerge Compose -- it guides you through the process of moving objects or people from one image to another.
New effects and frames in Quick Fix.
Three new Guided Edit effects.
Elements Live -- a section with very helpful tutorials as well as inspiration for your photographic endeavors.
New slideshow features -- much easier to use.
New e-mail features -- you can now use any e-mail program and there is no more need for verification codes from Adobe Mail.
Facebook Cover Photo - a new project in the Create section with themes for this photo. You can also upload these photos directly to Facebook.
The Organizer has gone through some updates and it also offers a new way to view your images (Adaptive Grid).

A 64-bit program for both Macs and Windows computers.

You can see Elements 13 in action here:  www.photoshopelementsuser.com/learningcenter/

For what is new in Elements 14:  helpx.adobe.com/photoshop-elements/using/whats-new.html

Hope this helps!

For Windows users, the biggest difference between Elements 12 and Elements 14 is that the latter is a 64-bit application.

Earlier versions of Elements are 32-bit applications. Even when installed on a 64-bit OS, Elements would install itself as a 32-bit app. This means that the maximum RAM available to Elements 32-bit was 4 GB (3.2 GB to be more precise). It made no difference if you had additional RAM installed on your computer (8 GB, 16 GB, etc.). On the other hand, the 64-bit version of Elements will be able to take advantage of more RAM. The more RAM Elements can use the better. It will help with those features and/or tools which are memory-intensive. In short, it will enhance this program's performance.

Here are screen shots of the memory usage for Elements 12 and Elements 14 installed on a computer running Windows 7 64-bit and with 16 GB RAM. You can see how much more RAM is available to Elements 14, a 64-bit app. NOTE: By default, Elements uses 70% of the available RAM.