
Live Picture: Software that was way ahead of its time - yottoy
http://www.pixiq.com/article/live-picture
======
pyalot2
1) Your site's burning, pitty most people won't see your article/images.

2) The claim to "unlimited everything" repeated numerously in the article as
well as "instant" anything is just hyperbole. There's no such thing in
software. It might've been cleverer than photoshop about things, but unlimited
and instant? No.

3) The claim to complete resolution independence is false. You might store
editing operations/layers as parameters, but the source material is still
resolution bound.

4) 48-bits is not that great honestly. At RGB (no word about alpha) that's
16-bit per channel. If it's normalized that's 64k graduations vs. 256
graduations. If interpreted as half float you'll only get 2 bits more per
channel (half-floats use a 10-bit significand). That's cool, but not all that
cool, either you get a non HDR format with a cool channel resolution, or
you'll get a HDR format with 4x more graduations than 8-bpc. No you know
what's cool? 32-bit single precision floats. 4 bytes, 32-bits per channel,
128-bit per pixel. You'll get 23 bits in graduations and HDR. Desktop graphics
cards use this format internally anyway.

~~~
jawngee
As someone that used it, it did indeed have all of those features. Sorry to
burst your bubble.

As for resolution independence, what they mean is that all of the operations
and manipulations you performed were resolution independent. If you upscaled
the image, any manipulations weren't simply upscaled, but reperformed at the
new scale which provided significantly better results.

It was indeed instant. You could load a 500 meg image on a machine with a
quarter of the ram and zoom, pan and mess with it in realtime. It was amazing
at the time.

~~~
pyalot2
Sorry to burst your bubble, if you think there's such a thing as unlimited and
instant you're sorely mistaken.

It might've been fast in simple cases compared to the alternatives, but
there's no two ways about it that all computation takes time, and you can make
tradeoffs where you cache more and compute less, but that's it.

It's not instant and unlimited. It's Limited and fast, or more limited and
faster, or more ram and faster, or more data and slower.

~~~
jawngee
Stop bending semantics to fit your binary view point.

Instant in this case means you move the brush and it distorts as you move the
brush. No parallax, no beach ball waiting for it to do the computation. It
happened as you moved it. It was instant. Even with brush sizes the size of
the image you were using.

It had unlimited undo. It had unlimited layers. That's not an arguable point.

~~~
pyalot2
Right, unlimited everything, got it.

/me wonders why he even tries to point out the folly to people with no clue
about how computers work...

~~~
woah
You are amazingly pedantic!

~~~
pyalot2
I write image processing software, I'm precise, there's a difference.

------
jawngee
I used to use live picture back in the day. It was pretty amazing, but we
never really fit it into our workflow because we were a very heavy digital
shop and photoshop still had a leg up in a few areas (this was a digital pre-
press and multimedia dev shop back in the early 90's).

Interestingly, we were also one of the first shops to have a digital camera
for use in pro photo shoots. It was a Leif back that fit onto a Hasselblad. It
would take one photo for each color plane, R, G, B, and each shot took about
30 seconds. You couldn't photograph people because of how long it took. But it
was good for catalog and still life and high resolution enough for print. I
think it cost about $10K if my memory serves.

------
chestnut-tree
The history of desktop applications is full of examples of clever or unique
applications that never took off or failed to gain widespread adoption.
Sometimes these applications had a superior interface to the dominant app (and
sometimes not).

It would be really useful to see a few side-by-side comparisons of how a task
is accomplished in LivePicture compared with Photoshop.

Although Photoshop is powerful and feature rich, I find the interface clumsy
and awkward (Illustrator, in my opinion, has an even clunkier interface). Does
the lack of serious competition against Photoshop keep Adobe from re-thinking
the interface?

Apple's Final Cut Pro clearly had some influence on subsequent releases of
Premiere Pro, but there's no serious competitor to Photoshop that I can think
of (yes, there are alternatives, but none that are likely to take users away
from Photoshop).

What's more, many people simply don't go looking for alternatives. Mastering
Photoshop or Illustrator will stand you in good stead in the employment market
if you're looking for a visual design job. And if you get stuck with an
application task, there's a good chance you'll find a solution by searching
for it online. There is an absolutely enormous number of supporting resources
around Adobe's Creative Suite of products: tutorials, training, books,
discussion sites etc.

All that helps to maintain the status quo and makes it much harder for
competing apps to gain attention.

~~~
ghaff
>Does the lack of serious competition against Photoshop keep Adobe from re-
thinking the interface?

It's probably more a case of pros who have invested a great deal of time in
adapting themselves to Photoshop's workflow and quirks would be really upset
if they rethought the interface--however excellent a job they did.

FWIW, Adobe did a really excellent job when they had a clean sheet of paper
with Lightroom, although it took a couple iterations to get there. (Mostly--
it's more modal than I'd prefer in some respects.)

------
mathnode
The photoshop competition was all on IRIX, and was a LOT better. Matador and
Amazon were great applications, and better performers on 64bit MIPS hardware.
Some got ported to Linux, but were then not maintained, or integrated into
other codebases.

Old / dead image editors (with deep colour) better than Photoshop at the time:

* IFX Amazon

* Alias Eclipse

* Da Vinci or something? Not the Colour/DI suite.

* Deep Paint

* Avid Matador

* I actually used Combustion for years. You can keep your photo-pap!

Alive alternatives:

* Cinepaint (Yes it works fine)

* GIMP 2.9 or GIMP 2.10 when it is released

* Node based compositing apps i.e. Nuke.

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igul222
Site appears to be down. Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Fe4HrH3...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Fe4HrH3mYJsJ:http://www.pixiq.com/article/live-
picture%2Bhttp://www.pixiq.com/article/live-
picture&hl=en&client=safari&nomo=1&biw=320&bih=416&prmd=ivns&strip=1)

------
valley_guy_12
Here's a brief comparison of Live Picture vs. PhotoShop.

It says Live Picture is sluggish and only better than PhotoShop on really
large images.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j7viI0y...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:j7viI0yXQkoJ:philip.greenspun.com/wtr/live-
picture-v-photoshop.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

~~~
revelation
It also seems to be from the 90s.

Edit: Maybe I'm mistaken and the linked site is talking about _software_ from
the 90s? It's down, so I really don't know. All I know is that they need to
stop calling that an "app", then.

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henningtegen
We are currently working on a application with similar features called
Leonardo although Leonardo is streamlined for digital painting, not photo
editing.

Leonardo is still at least 6 months away from being released but all the
features like "unlimited canvas", "instant painting" and handling of "huge
files" are already in place.

Main website: <http://www.getleonardo.com> (not much there yet)

We also just started a Vimeo channel were we "blog" about the progress of
Leonardo: <https://vimeo.com/channels/sol/>

Unfortunately there is no video right now showing the "unlimited canvas" and
"instant painting", but I can make one within the next couple of hours... :)

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rikacomet
A monopoly can also be seen as, a pioneer making something useful, others
being unable to replicate or challenge with their own.

take gimp for example, it is nowhere near the dominance of adobe. its like
windows-macintosh of the computer graphics world.

~~~
FuzzyDunlop
Even apps like Pixelmator don't quite get enough in there to adequately
replace Adobe's offerings.

In fact, I can only think of Dreamweaver as the prime example of something
that has _plenty_ of superior competition, attacking from a variety of angles.

~~~
rikacomet
indeed, thats a very good example, but still, what we are forgetting is the
insane amount of money it costs to buy adobe software, even if they have
lesser market share, they sure make up for it. Supposedly, their customers are
all the artist, for whom 1000-2000$ is like buying new clothes. This allows
adobe to further seal its position, through spending on R&D to pull further
ahead of the competition.

so we can say, adobe would not stand challenged until someone can beat them on
this part, with a proper strategy. Which is true for its current competitors,
all of which only try to make the best from their current possibilities.

------
virtualritz
The probable reasons this app failed, and any app that competes with PS will
(regardless of how well it tackles the resolution independence/feedback speed
issue): are two things:

1\. Workflow must match PS 1:1 for the majority of everyday image editing
operations. People that use PS are mostly creative folks who do no understand
image editing from a technical perspective. Solving a problem (a use case) to
them means to internalize a workflow. Mastering a 'deep' app like PS this way
takes years. If you write a competitor to PS and dont honor this experience
that took your target users years, often over a decade to aquire, you're
shooting yourself in the foot too hard to ever gain enough momentum on a
market that is dominated by PS (resp. its users).

This is imho also the reason why Adobe hasn't touched basic workflow in PS,
_ever_. Because if they did this, they risked alienating users and driving
them to test a competitor's product. Recall when Apple 'improved' the
UI/workflow of FinalCut Pro? The screams of outrage echoing through the web?
:)

2\. Feature set must be more or less identical to PS. You can 'plus' in some
areas but you can't 'minus'. If you have a use case that is not covered by
your app but by PS and it is even used by the average target user only once a
week in PS, this will be enough reason for them to not consider your app a
worthwhile alternative, even if you do get 1. right.

1\. is not too hard to do, engineering wise. But 2. is a huge task. PS simply
has _a lot_ of features.

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norswap
The article praises Live Picture, but offer no hints as to why it failed to
"kill" or even simply concurrence Photoshop.

~~~
pronoiac
I heard that it was due to the lack of plugins, and that was in turn due to a
tricky and complicated API. Live Picture used some interesting and complicated
data structures to work its magic, but all of that complication was exposed to
and required of plugin authors.

------
gallerytungsten
I recall trying Live Picture a few times, back in the early 90s. It was
promoted in the same kind of breathless tone as this article. My recollection
is that it in no way lived up to the hype. It was slow and crashed a lot.

------
aneth4
Why does Photoshop need to be killed? Seems like a good, powerful piece of
software loved by many.

~~~
frozenport
Adobe must die.

I set up a workflow for InDesign CS5.0 and everything worked. InDesign CS5.5
came out and they refused to sell me CS5.0. They introduced no new features,
but the export as HTML option started producing random crashes. I spoke with
their engineers and they said they would fix it in the next version.

We still experience a random crash in 1/30 automated jobs - which requires us
to redo a large portion by hand. I don't know if they had fixed it, but I know
they want thousands of dollars to upgrade to CS6.0.

Why did this problem happen? Because they released a new version called CS5.5
that introduced only bugs. Using Adobe software feels like you are being
robbed.

Adobe must die.

~~~
pretoriusB
Still you're using it, because there is no alternative.

Since it's the best software for what it does, your idea that "Adobe must die"
is based solely on a fantasy notion that whatever replaces it wont have bugs,
and will be all unicorns and love.

Not to mention that the bugs you mention are mostly specific to your workflow
(specific automated jobs et al), and don't mean that the most used software in
the industry is problematic in general. I've never been biten by any bugs in
other parts of 5.5 I use, like PS and Premiere, for example.

I also don't see why you were quick to jump to 5.5 since you "set up a
workflow for InDesign CS5.0 and everything worked.".

~~~
frozenport
I didn't want to use 5.5

I setup the work-flow and was ready to deploy. When I went to purchase the
licenses, the adobe sales rep said it was their policy to only sell the CS5.5
version.

I feel betrayed because each new version of Adobe's product brings more bugs
and no useful features. This is is a direct consequence of adobe's monopoly,
which disregards the needs of its users in favor of push new versions down our
throats. Reminds of Windows ME.

~~~
pretoriusB
> _I setup the work-flow and was ready to deploy. When I went to purchase the
> licenses, the adobe sales rep said it was their policy to only sell the
> CS5.5 version._

That's bad. Adobe does tend to screw their customers in similar business ways.

> _I feel betrayed because each new version of Adobe's product brings more
> bugs and no useful features._

Well, I don't know about InDesign much, but this is not true for: Photoshop,
Lightroom and Premiere.

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msohcw
I'd like to see the 'impossible image' that was created with LivePicture and
impossible for Photoshop...

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wyck
Could have..would have.

There is one thing than can still kill Photoshop, something on par for linux.

ps. do not say gimp, really.

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yottoy
Or is it 'should have killed Photoshop'...

~~~
eitland
no need to kill photoshop. Then we'd just have another monopoly.

~~~
yeap
The problem is no open source (or even closed) come even close to the
Photoshop workflow, and also integration with other monopolized software like
Illustrator and Fireworks. It's also one of the reasons why a lot of people
can't switch to Linux, winin' it is just not good enough

~~~
krapp
I've worked professionally with Photoshop and After Effects and access to
Adobe software is the only reason I still have a Windows computer. I don't
even want to try getting it to work in Wine, and dual-booting just to be able
to use them seems like a waste of time.

And until professionals use it in large numbers and are comfortable around it
and potential employers want to see it on a resume, other solutions aren't
going to matter.

~~~
chii
> potential employers want to see it on a resume

this is a problem imho - why should a vendor specific product be a defacto
qualification for a job? I know it is, and plenty of office clerk jobs
"require proficiency" in office/word/excel. I say, instead of requiring a
product name on your resume, you instead have to show you can achieve a
particular effect (say, describe a procedure to achieve a rock texture in the
abstract).

~~~
krapp
I suppose it can matter if that vendor's product is what they use in house and
if whatever the other thing is that you know, isn't. They may be worried about
the amount of effort they'd need to put into training you to do things their
way.

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lucian303
Just another case of superior tech losing out. Sad but true. All too often.

