![]() SAN FRANCISCO () - Most Adobe Systems Inc. Photoshop users have encountered MetaCreations Corp.' S Kai's Power Tools, the popular collection of special-effects plug-ins known by its initials, KPT. Over the years, MetaCreations has offered infrequent upgrades-spruced-up versions of the old plug-ins, along with a handful of new ones. But with KPT 6, MetaCreations has changed its approach: rather than updating the same software, the company has released a set of new filters to be sold alongside KPT 5, the previous-and now concurrent-version. (At press time, MetaCreations had recently announced its intention to divest itself of much of its graphics software, so it's likely that the KPT plug-ins will eventually be offered by a different company.)Like its predecessors, KPT 6 is a mix of some useful tools and some silly effects. Though the program's interface is not as obtuse as those of previous versions, some users may find that it has annoying characteristics. Power Tools & Hand Tools. Health & Household. Pool Cleaning Tools & Chemicals. Many spots of dabs of gel where you see ants foraging and entering. Staying Sharp KPT 6 consists of eight new plug-ins that work with Photoshop, MetaCreations Painter, and other image-editing programs that support the Photoshop plug-in architecture. As in previous KPT versions, each filter consumes the entire Mac screen with its own un-Mac-like interface. While it looks cool, this 'modal' interface can be irritating. For example, if you want to edit a document while viewing a reference image in the background, you're out of luck. We found the most useful new filter to be Equalizer, which lets you selectively sharpen different parts of an image using controls resembling those of an audio graphic equalizer. One Equalizer mode, Bounded Sharpen, prevents halos from appearing around high-contrast edges. The manual recommends using Equalizer with downsampled images, but we found it to be a good tool for many sharpening chores. LensFlare, a good replacement for Photoshop's simple Lens Flare filter, offers an impressive degree of control and high-quality results. However, lens flares are so overused that we can't get too excited about this plug-in. Font Filters Font Reserve lets you sort and filter fonts using a variety of criteria. KPT 6 also includes a number of filters for creating textures and odd surface effects. Materializer, for example, treats an image as a height map, where darker areas are higher (or lower, depending on your settings) than lighter areas. Materializer does all the work of adding highlights and shadows to make your 2-D image stand out in relief, giving you full control over light position, highlighting, and reflections. This plug-in is much more convenient than a 3-D package for creating bump-map and embossing effects, but its usefulness depends on the kinds of images you like to create. Ideal for creating still or animated water textures-as well as cool abstract patterns-Turbulence lets you distort an image into patterns that resemble pond ripples. This plug-in is beautiful to watch, and it's a good tool for videographers and 3-D animators. KPT's Reaction filter lets you create complex 'organic' textures from underlying images.
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March 2019
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