By far the best photo editing program is Live Picture 2.6.2 created by a team of French software engineers who were also artists. It was produced by John Sculley's Company Live Picture and originally sold for the equivalent of $5,000+. I use it for almost all my creative photography. I can do things with it that Photoshop or CS would choke on. And it only runs under 8.1 - 9.2.2 or under Classic (Tiger machine.) I have posted pictures at waeshael.leicaimages.com
And I have written about photography and this software at waeshael.com
If you are interested in learning about this program, I can provide the software which is no longer being sold or supported, and I don't think anyone will mind if I make a few copies. You can edit files 100+ megabytes on an old Powerbook with 128MB of memory, so handling modern TIFF images of 60 - 100 MB is no problem, and you can do an unlimited number of layered images. All images have to be converted to TIFF and then to IVUE format and there is a stand alone app to convert to IVUE. Everything is very fast. The program loads in 5 seconds. It is quite brilliant, and a joy to use compared with PS. Older PS 3.0 - 5.0 could save JPEGS as IVUE files by exporting to IVUE using a plug-in provided with Live Picture. And the LP image can be exported to PS for work with filters and the filtered file drops back into the composite in LP.
If any of this makes any sense to you, then have a look at LP - ask me anything you want. I have been using it since 2000. Several world famous photographs used it exclusively until Intel ruined the Mac and made it Mac for dummies (but I do use SNow Leopard as my main work station and I have three Macs running El Capitan - which are almost as fast as my Pismo running 9.1)
Live Picture is one of the few image-editing applications that is different in any dramatic way from Adobe Photoshop (the only other one that comes to mind is MetaCreation’s Painter). Most alternative raster manipulators offer a feature set similar to Photoshop’s at a lower cost, but Live Picture offers both strikingly different technology and a varied working environment. Anyone creating or editing images on a Macintosh should investigate this program, especially if the work involves the creation of large, high-resolution images for print.
Live Picture’s unique FITS (functional interpolating transformational system) technology is designed so that large (we mean humongous) files can be manipulated in real or near-real time. In Live Picture you can edit and manipulate a 500MB image with several layers in about the same time it takes to wield a 5MB image in Photoshop. Live Picture makes this possible by loading only the information needed to redraw the screen into memory.
To manipulate a photo in live Picture, the image needs to be in the program’s native IVUE (or FlashPix) file format. All the information about an image, and a mathematical representation of all the edits and manipulations you make to that image, are stored in a FITS file. When you finish changing, sizing, and altering the image, Live Picture builds the final file for output from the FITS file. The original source files are left untouched. The created FITS files are relatively small (regardless of the size of the source material), and builds can be of any size or resolution. You can output the image in a variety of file formats, including IVUE, Photoshop, PICT, TIFF, and EPS. A build’s length is determined by the size of the output, the number of layers, and the amount of manipulation to each layer. You can put off builds and do them in batches when time is available.
Live Picture creates 48-bit graphics (as opposed to the standard 24- or 32-bit images in Photoshop and other programs), which yields higher-quality images; this is especially noticeable when printing color gradients.
Live Picture features most of the functions you expect from a graphics-editing program. These include tools for cropping, scaling, rotating, dodging, burning, blurring, sharpening, and all types of color correction. Live Picture also supports the Adobe plug-in standard, allowing Photoshop and third-party extensions to work within the program. Many Photoshop effects are much slower in Live Picture than they are in Photoshop, but in Live Picture you can brush plug-ins onto specific areas of an image. This offers a tremendous amount of control over effects.
Live Picture lacks Photoshop’s channel operations and blend modes, however, and unfortunately doesn’t offer grids, guides, actions, or custom key commands. But features such as unlimited levels of undo and scalable vector text will surely make Photoshop-only users jealous. We also found Live Picture’s transparency tools to be more useful than Photoshop’s. Each layer in Live Picture has both a mask and a stencil, allowing precise control over the transparency of each layer. Version 2.6 adds a hard-edge mask feature, which allows sharper and more precise masking.
Live Picture offers vector tools for creating paths, and a new edge-highhghting tool that greatly simplifies this path creation. With edge highlighting you can draw rough paths for masking, and Live Picture automatically generates a precise mask by detecting edges. Of course, this only works with contrasting edges, but it’s handy for separating objects from their surroundings. Live Picture also imports paths from Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
Other new features in version 2.6 include an improved gradient tool and resolution-independent gradients; full support for the FlashPix file format, giving images the tileable independence to be high enough quality for output to film or small enough to embed in an HTML page; and TextureWorld. In TextureWorld, you can apply pre-made textures to any layer and generate an infinite number of new textures using editable bump, color, opacity, and refraction maps.
Surprisingly, Live Picture is very efficient with RAM. The program’s minimum requirement is 21MB, although 48MB is recommended for working with large images (hundreds of megabytes). Because the FITS files are so small. Live Picture also functions terrifically in a networked environment. You can easily send FITS files over a LAN, WAN, or the Internet, while the large IVUE files remain on a server to be accessed by multiple clients.
As one would hope from a program geared toward high-end printing. Live Picture works in CMYK mode. It also makes good use of Apple’s ColorSync to control color accuracy.
Live Picture ships with Canto Software’s Cumulus Image Database application as well as more than 600MB of royalty-free images. It’s a powerful package for working with images, even though for some functions, such as channel operations, you will need to keep a copy of Photoshop on hand as well.
Florio, Chris. (April 1998) Live Picture 2.6. MacAddict. (pgs. 46-47).
Live Picture, Inc.
Applications
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Live_Picturetm_2.6.1_.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
