Kai Krause is a legend in the world of Photoshop folk - a rock video special effects man turned high-flying programmer and interface designer, he did for the look and feel of Photoshop filters what H R Geiger did for screen monsters.
Now wealthy atop his Californian mountain, Kai can't keep producing KPT (Kai's Power Tools, now a brand-name of HSC Software) filters for special effects ad infinitum. But he's got a reputation for style like Marks and Spencers have for underpants, and that can't be allowed to go to waste...
So, KPT Power Photos is a clip-art photolibrary. Here is a man you would expect to champion the cause of copyright and the survival of creative individuals. So why should his company bundle up ten CD-ROMs, each with 50 full-page res photographs on it, and sell them for under a dollar each including all-rights use?
Answer - in a world where Corel Corporation has reportedly handed $25,000 to one photographer for CD-ROM rights to a mixed batch of trannies at $40 a throw, the KPT Power Photos collection is expensive. But it's not like those rip-off CDs which have 100 pictures for �250 and the only good ones are the six they used for the advert.
Here's a raw starfish (image, that is - sushi, not!)
And here's some raw sand. Pity about the wasted data space for those black borders, and the way the mounts cut the corners
Here is the editor's naff bit of composition work in Photoshop. Now you know why people like owning clip-photo libraries
Pitched exactly in the middle, with a collection of 500 useful images mostly with pre-defined mask layers for cut-outs, KPT pix are carefully selected. The fruit below is used on the promotional material and is obviously there because it�s colorful.
The 'cheers' wine glasses (below) is there because this is a difficult one to set up, expensive to shoot, entirely generic for worldwide use and very useful to have in many contexts.
The consistency of lighting and color make composites very easy (see awful example by DK). Scanning is not very sharp, and is limited tonally so that poor CMYK conversion won�t result in beefy colour. Inclusion of frame rebates of mounted slides (topmost uncropped examples) just wastes data - in a CD set like this, you should get the entire unmounted 24 x 36mm frame, not the Kodak card 22.5 x 34.5mm with another couple of mm lost through shading and rounded corners!
One excellent addition to this set is a Kodak browser and master CD of thumbnails. All in all, an excellent first set of clip photo images for any corporate or general user. Though many collections follow much the same philosophy, like PhotoDisc, and Corel's low-cost super-library is not short of fine material, this set is the best we�ve seen yet.