Live Picture: Software that was way ahead of its time

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.

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...

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.

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.

>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.)