Unbelievable, I thought... but the rumours persisted and finally, Live Picture appeared. It sounded too good to be true and few people had actually seen it. Eventually, in mid '93 (the international printing technology exhibition IPEX at the National Exhibition Centre) my designer wife, Sue, and I were given a demonstration of Live Picture by Paul Gurney and Allan Howard of Artline Solutions.
Artline are an Apple dealer and the main dealer for Live Picture (hereafter called LP) in the UK. Through their sister company FITS Distribution Ltd they train and support the European distributor network on behalf of Live Picture Inc., California.
LP really did handle 200 megabyte files with astonishing speed. We were awestruck! We were also awestruck by the price - £3,500 + VAT - and went away muttering about thinking it over. And we did; we thought it over rather a lot, for quite some time, every week getting a little nearer to the decision to buy it. What eventually convinced us that we should go ahead was the involvement of Kai Krause, the legend-in-own-lifetime Photoshop guru, in developing a new interface.
I had discovered KaiÕs Photoshop Tips some time before on CompuServe and had bought Kai's Power Tools to use in conjunction with Photoshop and we had been very impressed with it - in fact, we are using KTP and the more recent HSC software (Bryce, Convolver) every day. We felt that if the genius himself was getting involved it had to be the future. So we bought LP.
I was the first photographer in the UK to do so and indeed one of the first few owners of the program at all. The early versions suffered from a poor interface and a few bugs; the later Version 1.5 and now Version 2.0 prove our decision to buy to be correct. From the first Artline Solutions has supported us superbly.
To view a sequence of our images for a client's poster, and the resulting composite, click here.
Live Picture is a 48-bit imaging programme running on a Mac in 20Mb of RAM (we run in 80Mb) and needing 1 gigabyte of hard disc space.
First the scans must be converted to IVUE, an RGB file format, which Kodak have announced will be the basis of Photo CD in the future. The conversion of CMYK scans to RGB and then out again to CMYK is very accurate and we find that the makers' claim of only 1 to 2% loss in these conversions to be justified - other programs often losing far more.
There are three ways of inserting an IVUE file, which one chooses according to what one intends to do with that image.
Insert - the entire image or crop is brought into the programme to be worked.
Silhouette - a chosen area or colour may be automatically selected and cut out; this is quite remarkably successful in the case of hair, a difficult thing to select manually as anyone who has done it will know.
Distortion - various effects for distortion become available
Each image inserted, each piece of work - paint, cloning or filter effect - becomes a separate layer automatically and is therefore an independent and alterable entity. Layers can be turned on or off, duplicated or deleted at will.
Most of the time you are working with the brush tools; in fact LP is really a paint program, but with images as well as paint. You brush in and rub out images to whatever density and transparency you wish thereby mixing with under and over layers. Hard and soft edge stencils can be made and used as 'cookie cutters' in any layer. Text is handled as outlines which can also be stencils.
You work on an infinite pasteboard with a low-res screen version of your image, only accessing the high-res file as you zoom in... and in... and in. Pixels, as we know them, don't really exist in LP. The screen image is almost always smooth. This gives LP its speed.
LP is at its best in the area of mixing images together. You have available Gaussian-edged (soft) brushes which can be larger than the image itself thereby ensuring the most beautiful soft seamless blends, something unachievable in Photoshop - which, incidentally, we use daily and with which we are thoroughly familiar.
Resolution independence is the underlying source of LP magic. You can paint two or more colours, one across the other, and then enlarge a very tiny area of their conjunction, making it screen size; this will be an extremely soft and gradual blend and will be perfectly usable. In other programs which are not resolution independent this would be a pixellated mess. This applies to artwork initiated within the program. Images take their resolution at scanning into the program with them, but LP will interpolate each scan up to 200% rather well, so each inserted image can be scaled, cropped and enlarged successfully although the final size of use must be considered at the scanning stage. It's best to scan the image well oversize as this may prove useful later on and doesnÕt slow LP down.
LP is a very fast programme to use, operations such as rotation, perspectivising and 4-point distortion are easily done and revised, something that would be time consuming or impossible in Photoshop. There is a range of complex colour alteration devices, such as HSV converge target. Cloning is more difficult to use than that in Photoshop but in large areas - such as sky - is very impressive, in the case of tiny areas of very specific cloning, however, we still prefer Photoshop, as it is easier.
As the image is made, a separate file called a 'FITS file' is made; here the algorithmic information is held about the changes made, and finally applied when the composite image is built at the end. The image may be built at whatever size and resolution is required and may be either RGB or CMYK. We find that the final build is surprisingly swift, even with files of very many layers.
We quite regularly handle files in LP, without problems, which would amount to around 800Mb if multilayered in Photoshop.
We still take the final image into Photoshop to examine and tidy up small elements that may be slightly wrong. The absence of very small hard-edge brushes is something that we feel could be remedied and the method of cloning leaves much to be desired even though its results are very good.
Many people think that with the advent of Photoshop 3.0's layering system they can do with Photoshop what LP can do. Nothing could be further from the truth. LP complements Photoshop in many areas, but far outperforms it in image manipulation. I believe it really is a significant new technology and one that the major players are going to be watching carefully. In fact the real comparison is with the like of Barco Creator and the Dicomed systems of £50,000 and up.