Kai's Power Tools (KPT) started life as a set of graphic effect plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop on the Macintosh. It has passed through many incarnations, changed ownership and passed from the care of its inventor, Kai Krause. In its latest incarnation, under the stewardship of Corel's offshoot, Procreate, it's a set of nine filters. Calling them filters, though, belies their sophistication, as in some cases they're complex applets.

KPT Effects won't run on its own - it needs to be installed into a graphics program, which supports the Adobe plug-in protocol. If you want to run it with several different applications on your PC, Procreate recommends you install it separately in the plug-in folder of each application. But there's a workaround to install in a single directory, and the effects only take around 33MB in total, so it's not too much of a resource burden to hold them in several places.

Once installed, you can call any of the KPT Effects from the filter or plug-in menus of its host applications. Gone are the disparate editing screens of earlier versions with their 'individual' styles and modes of operation. In their place is a common screen design, and a much more corporate and sensible feeling.

Each screen shows a realtime preview of the graphic you're modifying, together with a multi-option menu and a small, graduated control slider. You use the slider for adjusting whichever parameter is currently selected. For example, select Spread in the Lightning filter and control the spread of jagged trails from the source.

The easiest way to explain what KPT Effects does is to run through the nine different effects. Most modify an existing picture, but one or two create new designs from scratch.

Channel Surfing applies blur, contrast and sharpen effects, and you can apply these to separate colour channels or to hue, luminance and saturation, giving scope for highlighting effects.

Imagine your image laid on water and you have the basic metaphor for the Fluid effect. You can drag your mouse across the image, in the way you might use a stick to mix oil paints on water. Distortions happen in real time and you can record it as an animation, as well as a still.

The Fraxflame II effect generates wispy, fairyish fractal-derived flames, from which it mutates a further 12 flames. Select any of the variants and 12 more mutations are created.

Linear, conical, elliptical, selection map and many other gradients (colour blends) are available through the Gradient Lab filter. You can also have multiple gradient layers to build up complex colour fills for irregularly shaped objects.

The Hyper Tiling effect splits your image into tiles and then lets you distort it into kaleidoscopic designs. The basic frames of reference for the tiling are vortex and pinch. Permutations are endless, but this effect needs to be used sparingly.

The Ink Dropper is another fluid effect, but this time the image is stable with an imaginary layer of water laid over it. On to this you drop spots of 'ink' with the mouse, which spread out across the surface. You can control the intensity and transparency and distortions happen in real time.

If you want to add a lightning bolt then use the Lightning tool, as you can control the position, spread, and even the jaggedness of the forks.

The Pyramid Paint filter can help to 'turn your photo into a painting', and it can have a good effect if done with panache and control.

Finally the Scatter effect adds spatters of dots or images to your work. This is ideal for trendy backgrounds and texturing effects.

KPT Effects provides a good range of filters, all of which have their place, although you'll use some more frequently than others.

System Requirements

Pentium 166 PC (we'd recommend at least 800MHz), 64MB Ram, 24bit 800 x 600 display, 25MB free hard disk space, CD drive, application supporting Adobe plug-in protocol (Photoshop, Photopaint, Painter etc)

Contact

Corel 0800 581 028 www.procreate.com