I would also reccomend Elements 6 or 7 for someone just starting and later on when you are more proficient there are lots of free plugins and actions that will give you a lot of the features of Photoshop CS# at a fraction of the cost if you do not want to go to the expence of purchasing CS#. :)

So you don't see exif info in 5.5. What's wrong with that?
According to me 5.5 can do most of your image editing.

Also it's better to do your image correction with what you have now. It's a stepping stone if you ask me.

As Duncan (yelvertoft) says, go for CS2 if you want to jump the height in one go.

Please use save for web and you can choose the picture type .jpg or .gif

Follow this, It's will working.

Do NOT follow this, save for web will strip the EXIF data from the image, which others may find useful.

Although I use CS3 predominantly, I do have PSE6 loaded on my laptop and tend to use this when on my travels and cannot recommend this high enough!