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Author Topic: Live Picture 2.6  (Read 4944 times)

Waeshael

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Live Picture 2.6
« on: January 06, 2006, 10:20:04 am »

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.
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Schewe

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Live Picture 2.6
« Reply #1 on: January 06, 2006, 08:16:34 pm »

Long ago in a galexy far, far away I was a big LP fan...pre Photoshop 3 days (LP had layers before Photoshop) and I still have my Live Picture 1.3.4 dongle. I paid $3,499 for it back in 94 I think. It was the cat's meow in it's day.

That said, the trouble converting to IVUE and the problems with the 2.6 interface (I actually saw a demo of live Picture 3.0 that was never finished) doesn't make LP a viable alternative to today's Photoshop. It does SOME things really well, but there's a whole lot it simply doesn't do...and never will since the LP source code is locked up due to the problems LP when it went out of the biz.

It was an interesting program, Kai Krause got the French guy to sign on to develop it, but LP Inc. was sold off as an internet play by John Scully (former Apple CEO). Gerry ByBee still does use it-particularly for the warping. There's an email list and some people are trying to keep it alive. Doubtful it will ever be re-written for OS X though...
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poliwog

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Live Picture 2.6
« Reply #2 on: January 08, 2006, 10:58:29 am »

Hi!

It's the Selective Color thing I love about LP. I keep my ancient MAC alive to run it, although it's been quite a while since I fired it up now. There is periodic discussion on the LP list about updating the code, but since I work mostly on Windoze (rather than Pussycat, Ocelot or whatever) it probably wouldn't help me in any case.

The Sharpen/Blur layers are cool too. The sharpening brush is amazing--you just move it over the image, and it's like magic. LP has greatly influenced what I do in PS. I tend to 'paint on' correction with Layer Masks rather than doing selections/masks/rubyliths.

Les
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Clay

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Live Picture 2.6
« Reply #3 on: January 09, 2006, 05:40:34 am »

Is it possible to use LP to print out several images on a single piece of paper -Is that basically what a RIP does??
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