Live Picture is a MAc OS editing application that is still used by illustrators and photographers because of its brushes, and how easy it is to adjust your pictures compared with CS, NX2 etc. It originally sold for $4,500, and now can be found on eBAy (if you are lucky) for about $30. LP is fast and can handle many images at once for illustration purposes. It is a great photo editor, after removing noise from an image in NX2, or such. It only runs on MAcs G5 and earlier, Tiger and earlier, not on intel platforms nor in Leopard.
For those of you who have no idea of what I am talking about, no need to read any further.
The brushes in Live Picture are very sweet because they allow you to brush in dodge and burn, sharp and blur, color adjustments etc. in such a way that you can't tell anything has been done to the photo. The app. allows the use of big color spaces, 32 bit or 48 bit editing, and the brushes can be sized to cover the entire picture or just a couple of pixels at a time. I set the upper button on the WACOM pen to + which increases the brush size and to - to decrease the brush size. The amount of the change that is brushed on can be adjusted by brushing over the area several times until the desired change is affected. Set the brush control to PASTEL or to WATER or a combination of both for subtle changes. The eraser (other end of the pen) allows for a similar controlled erase. For fast erasing deselect PASTEL and WATER. On the WACOM INTUOUS tablet the buttons along the top can be set for varying amounts of effect 0 being lowest to 9 the highest.
Any change is instantaneous even on an older computer. Live Picture opens in 2 seconds on my old G5, and a 150MB image file saves in 1 second. COmpared with NX2 it is lightning fast. I use NX2 for noise suppression, and for conversion to the Web - all else I do in LP because it is fast, produces better looking images, and can handle unlimited image files for complex illustrations - i.e ten or twenty image files can be layered with hardly any effect on speed, and only a modest increase in file size.
With the WACOM tablet from Graphos, Intuous, through Bamboo touch, "painting" in Live Picture is easy - much easier than Painter, CS+ and so on.
For examples go to RangefinderImages.com and look for pictures tagged WAESHAEL (almost 200 pics. as of Oct 2011) which have all been made using Live Picture 2.6.2
