It’s an exciting and scary week around here. I’ve been putting off upgrading my old G5 Mac tower for far too long. It was running fine but beginning to get a little tired. I could respect that. I get a little tired, too. But then Snow Leopard came along — running only on Intel-chipped machines — and I began to fall behind. Still no biggie. No real urgency. And that became my downfall.

Now we have an update from Adobe to the entire Creative Suite — CS5. A few days later, Lightroom 3. I held out until after the WWDC just in case Apple made any updates to the Mac line-up (something without a shiny screen maybe?) but, when there weren’t, I pulled the trigger and placed my order. Or should I say “orders”. Piles of boxes have started to arrive and the installation process has begun but I think I’m in for a multi-day process. Common sense has always told me to just update one thing at a time. Then, if something goes crazy, you know what is likely to blame. There will be no such common sense this time. New hardware and all new software. If there is a conflict, I’ll have one heck of a time figuring out where it is. Luckily, that doesn’t happen as much as in the old days. I also tend to stick with just the necessary software — not a lot of system modifiers, etc. that can lead to trouble. Call me overly cautious but I make my living with these Macs and I don’t care to spend my time trouble-shooting software conflicts when I can be billing hours.

With all of these updates there will be a slight shift in the focus of this blog. I plan on doing more technique and how-to posts, sharing what I learn about the new features in Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3, Aperture, etc. We’ll see how it goes but this may be just the first phase of this new direction. Exciting times for sure.