Wacom Intuos drawing tablets are pretty cheap. Photoshop is complicated. So I bought a new iMac.
OK, so there's more that comes before that and more in between. Something like:
Over the last few years I have become interested in digital drawing and painting.
Seemed like something that would be fun to try.
But there are so many different tools and software.
So start small.
Wacom Intuos drawing tablets are pretty cheap and still highly rated for beginners.
Drawing tablets hook to computers via USB, and the computer runs the software.
Software choices are endless.
Many of them free.
Most have their own fairly steep learning curves.
Abode Photoshop is considered by many to be one of the best for digital drawing.
Might as well tackle the Photoshop learning curve directly.
A good start might be to get an inexpensive Wacom Intuos and try Photoshop for a while.
Adobe software is now only available by online subscription/download.
Online subscription is the current version only.
The current version of Photoshop only runs on Mac OS one version higher than I'm running now.
I could upgrade my 2010 iMac one version and hope that Photoshop would run effectively.
Any Mac OS upgrades after that one bump are not possible on my old machine.
I've been looking at a new iMac for a while now.
There's a few other software things that wouldn't run well, or at all, on the old iMac.
iMacs are pretty cheap, relatively speaking.
So I bought a new iMac today.
And a Wacom Intuos Medium drawing tablet yesterday.
And a $2.99 per month iCloud upgrade to 200 GB of storage so I can get the 16,989 photos and 437 videos off the old iMac.
As of now, 14.07 GB out of 102.8 GB of photos and videos have uploaded to iCloud. In ~5 hours. There are 15,637 items to go. So... maybe 30 hours to go at that rate. iCloud bulk uploads like this are notoriously slow the first time. Or so they say.
I won't set up the new machine until the backing up of the old one is complete, as I guess I have a fear of confusing the iCloud by putting a new machine on the same Apple ID while it is doing all that work on the other one. Seems reasonable to me. It might even be correct, who knows.
This also addresses the many-years-overdue issue of 9 years of my family's photo history being on one hard drive with no recent backup. Which is a good thing. The backup, that is, not the 9 years of neglect prior to that.
When the new machine is set up, I'll download the Photoshop trial and give it a go. I have played around with the new tablet on the old machine (last night) with some free software that came with it. It's fun. But hard. I think I will enjoy the challenge posed by the learning curve with the tools, although I know that there will be times that I will get frustrated and want to throw the whole bunch out the window. Hopefully those moments will pass. Or maybe just the Wacom tablet goes out the window and I keep the nice new computer.
I'd add some pictures to this blog post but this old computer is really busy right now...
[As a footnote, the current Mac OS is Mojave. Before that was High Sierra. Before that was Sierra. Before that was El Capitan, which is what the 2010 iMac is running. It can be upgraded to Sierra, but that's the end of the line for that hardware (no High Sierra or Mojave). Grace's 2013 iMac is running Sierra. Catalina is the new Mac OS due out this fall.]
