Augment Photoshop with an image compositor -- Live Picture or xRes -- for faster, more flexible manipulation of large images
Ben Long
Desktopmedia
The mantra of most Photoshop users is "More RAM" -- especially when they use Photoshop to edit large and complex images. Many Photoshop operations can be agonizingly slow on very large, full-color images such as posters, backdrops for film or video sets, and high-resolution color spreads for books or magazines. And even if you work on images that are only 15 to 20 MB in size, once you've layered six or seven of them in Photoshop and added a few layer masks in between, you'll find yourself doing more waiting than working.
In Photoshop situations such as these, buying enough RAM to make a difference can be prohibitively expensive. Fortunately, there's a cheaper way to speed things up: by performing many of your image-processing steps in either of two new image-compositing applications: Live Picture 2.5 ($995), from Live Picture (800-724-7900 or 408-464-4200), and xRes 2.0 ($699), from Macromedia (800-326-2128 or 415-252-2000).
Users who create collages and composites will find that Live Picture and xRes offer not only speed improvements but also environments tailored to multilayered work. Of course, there are a lot of things to learn about these Photoshop cousins. Follow along as we help you figure out which program best fits your needs and show you how to get the most out of whichever one you choose.
Doing the File Shuffle
The first step in integrating Live Picture or xRes into your work flow is moving images into these applications. Because they can't work efficiently with Photoshop, PICT or TIFF files, you'll need to convert such files into the appropriate format, either Live Picture's IVUE or xRes' LRG.
Converting images into these formats can take a bit of time. Live Picture is relatively speedy, converting a 30-MB TIFF file into IVUE format in just 2.5 minutes. The same conversion in xRes took 11 minutes. However, unlike Live Picture, xRes does have a batch-processing utility, so you may want to convert all the files in a composition at one time. Both programs can output TIFF or EPS images when you're finished.
Tips
* Use xRes' batch-conversion module before you start to work. This will save you the hassle of waiting for each image to convert into LRG.
* Use Live Picture's Photoshop-export filter for converting Photoshop images directly into IVUE format.
* Register your copy of Live Picture. If you do, you'll receive a Photoshop Acquire module, FastEdit IVUE, from Total Integration, which lets you open portions of an IVUE file within Photoshop. This is great for removing an overlooked dust mark or scratch before you build your final image.
Layering
If you're creating composite images with lots of different elements, you may find the Photoshop-like palette in xRes the easiest tool to use. The xRes Layers palette lets you change the stacking order of layers as well as hide and delete layers, exactly as you can in Photoshop. If you're comfortable with the numerical controls in QuarkXPress, on the other hand, you may feel more at home in Live Picture; it offers precise numeric controls for positioning, resizing, rotating, and skewing layers.
You'll use layering for more than just composite work in Live Picture, however; operations such as color correction, sharpening, blurring, and distorting involve creating special kinds of layers in your document. You apply and control a layer's effect by brushing in the effect, using Live Picture's brush and gradient tools. This approach gives you the flexibility to alter images easily.
Tips
* In xRes, handles for resizing an image don't appear if they're outside the canvas; to get around this limitation, add a few inches to your document. Because xRes can work with very large canvas sizes without doing extra calculations for the larger image area, you don't need to worry about the program slowing down.
* Try using the numeric controls in Live Picture to get precise sizes and positions for layers rather than moving the layers by hand. This can prevent seams from appearing in the final composition.
* If you add an EPS layer in Live Picture, make sure your final output format is an EPS DCS file. If you don't save in EPS DCS format, Live Picture will use the low-resolution EPS preview rather than the high-resolution data in the final image.
Masking
Masking tools make it possible to seamlessly blend one image into another. The ability to mask out areas based on color or user-defined selections is essential to any compositing work. If you find yourself trying to create detailed masks, either xRes' or Live Picture's tools will be able to save you time, and they offer capabilities not found in Photoshop's masking arsenal.
Besides offering the standard selection tools, Photoshop allows you to create masks by selecting a range of colors. xRes and Live Picture offer a similar kind of masking that you may find more flexible than Photoshop's tools.
In many instances, xRes' Mask palette does a better job of generating masks than Photoshop's Color Range command, because you have more control over color range and feathering than you do in Photoshop. xRes' Mask palette lets you select up to seven colors to create a mask by using controls for color "tolerance" and feathering. You can use a brush to create a mask based on any combination of the seven colors or allow xRes to create it by using the Auto mask command. We found that brushing worked better than the Auto mask command, in that the brush lets you vary the colors and tolerance of the color selections as you build the mask.
Live Picture does a remarkable job of creating detailed masks. For example, it can easily separate fine details such as hair from a background image, using a Silhouette layer. Silhouette layers act like a mask, letting you import an image and define the inside and outside of the silhouette by painting over colors with the silhouette brush, which automatically finds all similar colors in the image.
Tips
* In xRes, remember to turn on the appropriate mask channel for the layer you are editing. You can have multiple masks per layer, so you must explicitly turn on the mask channel you want to work on.
* Live Picture's Silhouette layers can be created only in a separate mode. Be sure to set your zoom level and hide any layers you don't want included in a Silhouette before you get started.
Correcting Colors
xRes and Live Picture offer unique ways to apply color corrections -- with a brush. Both programs also offer Photoshop-like color-correction tools such as Levels and Curves dialog boxes, but the tools' real flexibility comes in selectively applying color corrections to certain parts of an image, such as the sub-ject's lips in a portrait or a river in a landscape photograph.
Color-correcting a selected region in Photoshop requires building a mask and then using the Curves dialog box to make your adjustment. Instead of making you go through this two-stage process, xRes lets you apply several types of color correction with a brush. For example, you can add contrast to a part of an image simply by brushing with the Contrast brush or you can paint color into an area with the Tint brush. xRes stores each of the brush strokes as an operation, making it possible to add contrast or tints with a 1-pixel or 1,000-pixel brush without suffering any speed penalty.
For jobs where flexibility is the key or in which you anticipate a lot of changes, Live Picture's selective color correction may work best for you. The program's Color Correction layers allow you to darken, lighten, saturate, or completely change existing colors in your composition. You can additionally colorize or tint your composition, using a Colorize layer. Any effects in a Color Correction layer apply to all the layers underneath, unless you limit the effect by creating or copying a stencil. Although this approach doesn't do away with the need to use masks, it does give you the flexibility to alter the color at any point in the process.
Tips
* Instead of building masks in xRes to alter contrast or saturation in a specific area, use xRes brushes for much faster results.
* Use Live Picture's Color Correction layers on jobs that may involve a lot of client-requested changes. You can save a lot of time by using Live Picture's layer approach.
Painting
For those who find themselves painting on large canvases, both Live Picture and xRes offer unique, infinitely large brushes that are not part of Photoshop's arsenal. The speed of both program's brushes makes them ideal for creating large works of original art.
xRes is the superior large-image painter, with a comprehensive set of natural-media brushes that can paint at unlimited sizes. Following the lead of Fractal Design Painter, xRes provides oil, charcoal, watercolor, pencil, and crayon brushes as well as an assortment of paper textures that show through as you paint. You can start with broad strokes and then zoom in to do fine-detail work.
Live Picture offers only basic airbrushing and smearing tools, but we really like the results achieved with Live Picture's unique distortion brushes. The program's few textured brushes, which include Fibre and Granite, lack the sophistication of xRes' brushes. The distortion brushes, however, let you selectively distort areas of an image, pushing and pulling pixels.
Tip
* Although much faster than Photoshop, xRes can still slow to a crawl when you pan across and zoom in on an image containing a lot of brush strokes. Use the Render Objects command in the Objects palette to render the brush strokes into a layer, and xRes will regain a lot of its speed. Live Picture optimizes the distortion effects when you build the final image, yielding sharp results not possible with Painter or Photoshop.
Demanding Duties
Whether you choose xRes for its familiar interface or Live Picture for its unique silhouetting and color-correction tools, you can create large, multilayered images faster than you can with Photoshop. The layering tools in xRes work just as they do in Photoshop, so you should be up and running easily. We also found the natural painting tools useful for creating very large originals. Live Picture, despite its unique interface, offers good controls for color-correcting selected areas of an image and for easily creating accurate masks with the silhouetting layers. No program can solve every artistic challenge associated with immense images, but with xRes and Live Picture in your arsenal, you may find yourself invoking your muse instead of blowing a fuse.
Ben Long is a San Francisco-based writer who creates both analog and digital collage artwork and likes clarinets.
Still Need Photoshop?
FOR EDITING PIXELS, you'll still need Photoshop. In fact, Photoshop works best for any work on images smaller than 10 MB. Here are some of the features Photoshop offers that we recommend you rely on.
* Color correction. Photoshop offers the fastest method for global color correction, thanks to the video-lookup-table animation. Because Photoshop hooks directly into the video output, the Levels or Curves dialog boxes give you instantaneous previews of color changes.
* Dust and scratch cleanup. Although xRes can directly edit pixels in its direct mode, it can't match Photoshop's speed. If you need to clean up a scan, Photoshop is still the best tool for this tedious but necessary job.
* Printing. Live Picture lacks a Print command, and xRes lacks printing-specific controls such as dot gain. We have our quibbles about Photoshop's separation engine, but the engine is tested and solid and we still rely on it for our printing needs.
* Duotones. If you want to print an image with custom inks to get a sepia-tone look or if your client wants a specific Pantone color, Photoshop is the only tool for the job. Live Picture and xRes can re-create such effects with CMYK but not with custom inks.
Behind the Imaging Curtain
TO COMPREHEND THE DEGREE of difference these programs can make in your work process, you first need to understand how their approach differs from Photoshop's.
Photoshop is the consummate pixel-editing program. Every change you make to an image in Photoshop, whether you're applying a filter or increasing the contrast, makes Photoshop calculate the results pixel by pixel for the whole image -- and you have to wait. If you're editing an 8-x-10-inch image at a resolution of 300 dpi, Photoshop must process 27.5 MB of data. Of course, you want a fast undo, so Photoshop must keep two copies in RAM. Add in several layers and paint on a floating selection, and you'll find that Photoshop requires upwards of 200 MB of RAM to work efficiently -- much more RAM than many of us can afford.
xRes and Live Picture are cut from a different cloth. Rather than calculating effects on and processing each pixel in an image as you work, these programs simply show you a preview of the part of the image that fits in the current window and store in a list all the changes you make to the image. So, for example, as you scroll or zoom to a new part of the image, the programs process the list of changes and apply them to the portion of the image you're currently viewing. When you're finished editing your image in xRes or Live Picture, you tell the program to apply the operations at a specific size and resolution to create a final image.
figure 2 / Silhouetting in Live Picture: A Silhouette layer lets you select the inside and outside colors of a silhouette by painting. We've painted out a simple blue sky to replace it with something more dramatic.
figure 1 / Layering in xRes: xRes lets you have multiple masks per layer -- in xRes parlance, Objects -- that you can use to clip out parts of a layer. You can also paint on multiple masks or add, subtract, or multiply masks within or between layers.
