Need advice about upgrades

I just bought my daughter a mbp for graduation. It is a mid 2012 15.4", 4GB, 500 GB HHD i7 2.3 GHz. She is going to use it for college and she is starting a side gig doing photograpy for extra money while in college. After I bought it I was doing some reading on here and read that a lot of you using photoshop prefer 16 GB. I read somewhere that the 4 GB can only be upgraded to 8 GB but I also read that the mbp supports 16 GB so I think I could do that 3rd party later anyway. I am wondering if you guys think it is worth the extra $255 to exchange this one now for the 8GB with the 256 GB SSD. Any advice from your experience would be greatly appreciated as I am giving it to her tonight for graduation.

mid 2012 15.4", 4GB, 500 GB HHD i7 2.3 GHz.
The MBP you purchased for your daughter is an excellent computer.  May I suggest getting the additional RAM from OWC or Crucial.  A 16GB kit is currently $125 and you can upgrade it yourself.   I'd keep the 500GB hard drive (not get an SSD) and instead invest in an external drive for backup and extra storage.   (BTW, did you get AppleCare with this MBP.  If not, I'd certainly recommend it.)
Exchanging your MBP for another model with a 256GB SSD?   Well ... imho it's not a good idea.  It's more money for less capability (even if the SSD is modestly faster than a hard drive, it's half the capacity of the 500GB hard drive).  If your daughter makes good use of the MBP, and even more if she really gets into digital photography, a 256GB SSD is not going to be nearly enough storage (for the system, applications and data combined) and you will be looking at getting an external hard drive anyway.
For comparison purposes, I have a late 2009 MBP with 8GB RAM, 750GB hard drive and it runs Adobe CS6 Design Suite (Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator & Acrobat), Aperture and Final Cut perfectly - plenty of speed and performance.  Your 2012 MBP with 16GB will be even better for these apps.

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