Asiva Photo 1.02, a new image editor, offers users a different way of working, but it's not without flaws. Like MGI's Live Picture and Macromedia xRes 3, Asiva Photo displays a downsampled proxy image on screen, records your edits in an edit list, and renders them to the full-resolution data on request.

The program's clean, powerful editing interface is based on working with hue, saturation, and luminance instead of conventional controls over RGB or CMYK channels. Each edit, or operation, is queued in an operations list. You can save both individual operations and sequences of operations for reuse.

You use operations to shift; to remap; and to adjust gain for hue, saturation, and luminance, or for RGB or CMYK. The operations maps let you control how operations are applied to an image.

Asiva Photo's major flaw is its rendering scheme--today's hardware is fast enough for editing actual pixels in large files. On a dual-processor 800MHz G4 running Mac OS X, we had to wait several seconds for the operation to render before we saw its effect. On a 450MHz G4, performance was agonizingly slow.

Macworld's Buying Advice

If you are new to image editing--or are looking for an entirely different way of working--and your files are modest in size, Asiva Photo may be worth a look. For most users, though, it's likely to be an exercise in frustration.