Re: image editing software design idea

Hi Piotr,

I'm in !

This might be the beginning of the new revolutionary / smarter than the big
$$ - Project...

I love the idea and I am Sydney based independant developer... (Avalon)

The last I had a look at Livepicture, was 10 years ago and so far I didn't
see anything like that. At this time I was making a bit of money being a
consultant in the Design and Printing industry. I ran this amazing piece of
software on my mac LCIII (if you dont remenber or you are too young for
that - 25MHz CPU, 32Mb RAM, 80Mb Drive + 200Mb external drive - sic) and
even if a bit slow, it could manage 100Mb images on my machine - that stuff
was a cracker !

My understanding of the failure of Livepicture was (beyond obscure bad
choices from the managing team) :
- the thing was to far (or way beyond) the way people would use PS - and
acces to basic stuff like cropping, resizing, etc was not trivial
- no everybody needs to deal with images that big ( since the dot-com and
now mobile devices boom, they are more focused on 3.27Kb images )


I had a quick read to your specifications, nothing seems impossible. I think
that the trick would be to integrate it all in a natural yet complete user
interface - the one that would make you dream - (Sketches more than welcome
!)

The idea would be to design a piece of software that does everything you
wrote plus deal with crappy little web pictures...or not...

As usual, a killer product would be a great underlying technology (vector
based image manipulation) with the right gui to action it.

Let me know

Regards

Jean-Marc




"Piotr Stopniak" <piotr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:42e25a57$0$21370$5a62ac22@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> There's no nda's or anything like that at this stage, more less just long
> discussions in the office on what is wrong with the current paradigm
> (Photoshop-like apps)and how to improve it from the end-user perspective
> anyway, none of us are programmers.
> I am yet to discuss with my boss wether he might be interested in putting
> a bit of money into this but we're a small business so I doubt that...
> open source/linux spirit?
>
>
> Some of the essential features we require in high end retouching are:
>
> Speed - that's the biggest one. On a dual 2.2Ghz G5 with 8Gb RAM + 4 drive
> RAID (around 280Mb/s) Photoshop still takes up to 5 minutes to save some
> of the files. Photoshop also looses a lot of interactivity due to slow
> screen refresh. We make a lot of subtle adjustments and when comparing
> changes by turning layers on and off photoshop often clears the screen and
> takes several seconds to fill the tiles again making it difficult to judge
> effects.
>
> Colour accuracy: ICC profile based CMS is essential. 32 bit depth would
> also be nice. Livepicture was full 48 bit and almost NEVER produced
> banding in gradients. This is more than can be said for photoshop (which
> still has 8 bit masks)
>
> Flexibility - Clients want changes. everything needs to be flexible. This
> is a shortcoming I found in Gimp, the lack of adjustment layers or
> similar. History/Journal in Photoshop/Gimp are great though.
>
> Scalability/UI customisation - Photoshop actions are great but there's a
> lot of crap in there I would rather not load if I don't have to.
> For a good 70%-80% of jobs the only things we use are:
>
> -Layers/Masks/Selections
> -brush and clone (healing brush is great)
> -CURVES (and more curves)
> -Hue/Sat adjustments
> -Blur - both on images, masks and selections. Mainly gaussian but
> sometimes radial and motion (which has a 70% chance of crashing ANY
> version of Photoshop, including CS2).
> -Transform/free distort
>
> Also features such as smudge and warp come in handy now and then.
>
> Live Picture is one application that almost satisfied but it had it's own
> problems as well however it was and still is extremely fast, especially on
> large files (150mb+) it is easily 10 times faster than PS.
>
> As far as interface, I imagined this to work much like modern video
> effects compositors using a node based flow system.
> The user would construct the composite image using nodes for file
> input/colour correction/masks etc.
> The advantage is that you can easily reuse masks which to some degree is
> achieved in PShop CS by masking layer sets but there are situations where
> that's inadequate. A node based structure would also the same colour
> adjustment node to affect a series of elements with individual masks.
> A node paradigm is a lot more flexible and also more readable than the
> layer pallette, even with good layer grouping and naming it's difficult to
> see which layer does what.
>
> A lot of the jobs we do also go to multiple crops: bill board sites,
> different magazine formats, so being able to stick several output nodes on
> the end of your composite flow would be a handy thing.
>
> I had this idea that while you work on your composite you only create a
> type of script so like livepicture, the file you save, your working file
> would only be small, it would source full res scans etc at render time
> when all your work is done.
> This would let you save your work without worries and 5 minute delays.
>
> Livepicture was resolution independant, somehow did everyting in vectors,
> all brush strokes, warps and paint on colour corrections were vectors
> hence you could output your render at any res.
>
> I think this is enough for one essay.
> Tell me what you think? are they feasible ideas?
>
> Regards,
> Piotr.
>
>
> Wenny Macura wrote:
>> Piotr Stopniak wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> first time poster here...
>>>
>>>
>>> I work for a retouching company in Sydney
>>> (http://www.electricart.com.au) using photoshop to do 90% of our editing
>>> work and realised that as time goes by Photoshop is becoming a bloated
>>> beast... too slow, too many useless features etc (sorry lens flare
>>> filter fans).
>>>
>>> For the remaining 10% of our work we use a now discontinued program
>>> called Livepicture.
>>>
>>> We work with LARGE files... drum scans from 100mb up to about 500mb...
>>> multiplied by 50+ layers and you got 10GB photoshop files that can't be
>>> worked on in real time. (Our office size record was a 16bit CMYK, 250mb
>>> base size photoshop file which quickly bloated to 40GB).
>>> Photoshop can't cope with such sizes.
>>> As far as I know (and technically I don't know much) Livepicture works
>>> at screen res and utilises fits file format which lets it work on any
>>> resolution source files in real time.., smudges, warps and 1200px size
>>> brushes all work on 500mb scans with the same speed as they would on 1mb
>>> scans all at 16bit/channel. But it's not without limitations either.
>>>
>>> So basically I'm looking for anyone interesed in developing a better
>>> alternative not just a photoshop clone like gimp.
>>>
>>> I have a good idea of the user end design required for the and I think I
>>> have some unique solutions for interface, just need someone who can turn
>>> those into reality.
>>>
>>> Anyone interested?
>>>
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Peter.
>>
>> More details, NDA etc.
>> Let me know
>> Wenny


.

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