Unfortunately, Live Picture only ran on Mac. Photoshop was a bit janky on SGI back then, IIRC, but still the better of the two platforms overall.
[1] http://lensgarden.com/uncategorized/live-picture-software-th...
Live Picture was one of several photo compositor tools that focused on Photoshop’s pain points. Fauve Matisse was a little earlier than Live Picture and I believe it introduced layers to Mac photo editing. They ended up getting acquired by Macromedia (or perhaps even Macromind) after a rewrite to compete with Live Picture it was renamed Xres and then abandoned.
It was ported over to Irix (and Sun/Solaris/HP-UX and Rhapsody) using a toolkit called Lattitude[1], sort of a reverse-engineered Mac toolbox, that translated Mac API calls to the appropriate Unix/Motif/$Whatever calls, using the native look and feel.
The earlier version was used to port MS Word/Excel to Unix. Metrowerks purchased it for porting (classic) Mac apps to Rhapsody.
[1] http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Ju...
[There's an IEEE article if you have access, which I don't:
I also believe that Photoshop was 'inspired' to introduce layers in version 3 in response to Livepicture's layers. It was layers which caused Photoshop to explode in popularity.
Adobe then went on to sue Macromedia for using tabs in their interface. Bummer.