Live Picture the King of all Photo Editing Software

I have just finished Gallery submission number 2 for 2007 [fingers crossed on this one]. Anyway for some reason I decided to really tweak my images for the gallery application, in a way that I hadn't for some time. Live Picture, a now dead piece of software, was my app of choice back in the day when I began digital photographic print making. It runs OK in Classic on my laptop, but screams in OS 8.1. After a bit of a fiddle on my laptop, I felt my time would be more productive if I used my old beige G3 running OS 8.1.

Ooooooo drool. I had forgotten about the speed and ease of use on this gorgeous app which coincidentally originally retailed for $3,000 Canadian upon it's release. When it came out it in the mid 90's, it could open 200 meg files as if they were txt files and on a power Mac with the then whopping great pile of 128 meg of ram. A brush stroke happened in real time, there was no destruction of pixels in the editing process, as it was NOT a pixel editing app magnification was limitless, and it just does things the way Photoshop will never be able to do.

So with 8 images to tweak and edit for the then due proposal over the weekend, away I went, feeling guilty for spending such little time trying to achieve an end result, all up I think I spent 3 hours with 8 images. Some minor masking and curve adjustments, working swiftly with my pen and tablet as if I was really drawing. Oh the joy of it all. It will be a sad day when my beige G3 finally dies, this application really made the process of image editing a real joy, encouraged time spent with images, allowed infinite undoes all retrievable at any stage of the process. The editing is done in 16 bits internally and no pixels are harmed in the process. The edited files fit on a floppy disk, can be built out to suit the web or a billboard, and at at no point is the app getting in your face, it just edits.

Graceful, elegant, simple.