My guess is that not many of you know about Live Picture, a MAC only photo compositing and image manipulation program that once sold for $7,000 but can now be found on the web for less than $100. It is a program still in use by many professional illustrators/photographers. It has incredible capabilities and is easy to use, but can do things that are very time consuming and difficult to do in photoshop. I have been using it for all my professional work for many years, migrating it from MAC to MAC. It runs on MAC OS 9.2.2 (and older versions) and in Classic on OSX through Tiger. File structure is IVUE and PS 3.0 through 7.0 can write IVUE format and read it, so you can do some work in PS (LAB color adjustments, noise filtering etc) and export to LP for some serious compositing work. The layer scheme keeps all your edits even after the file is saved, so you can undo absolutely anything. Silhouetting is much better then PS. Masks are a doddle. You can blur and sharpen bits of the image in the same layer. Nothing is done to change the pixels in the original image, all edits are saved in a special file called FITS which remembers everything you have done to the file. For instance if you blur something 75% and after printing think it is too much, you can go back in and without erasing what you have done, just paint over the blurred portion with a lower level setting. In fact all image changes are "painted on", no need for the lasso tool ever again!
Anyway it is a brilliant program, and deserves to be part of every MAC users photo kit. If you want to see some work done - check out Gerald Bybee http:bybee.com.
Glad to answer any questions on Live Picture.