Kai's Power Tools 3: An Illustrated Guide: Windows and Macintosh

Kai's Power Tools 3: An Illustrated Guide, the second edition of Nick Clarke's guide to mastering KPT, focuses on the Macintosh and Windows editions of the newest version, KPT 3.0. The book is attractive and in full color, which makes it a delight to read and a particularly helpful guide. Although KPT's filters provide for a seemingly infinite range of effects, the interface is famously quirky; you use funky 3-D controls and a few obscure options to tweak the various effects. Clarke takes you through the large filters, KPT Spheroid Designer, KPT Gradient Designer, KPT Texture Designer, and KPT Interform, each of which has its own interface. Then he reviews the smaller filters, such as Glass Lens, Twirl, Vortex and Planar Tiling, Gaussian f/x, and Noise f/x, which work within the Compact interface or the KPT Lens f/x interface. Finally, Clarke explains two older filters, Texture Explorer and Fractal Explorer, which were in versions 2.0 and 2.1 of KPT but are also included in version 3.0. Throughout the book you get lots of advice on creating specific effects for type, photographic images, and more. Clarke targets every level of user, from beginner to advanced, providing step-by-step instruction, helpful hints, and large screen shots along the way. This book is a great guide for anyone who's ever been stumped by KPT. A CD-ROM includes sample graphics, demo versions of other MetaTools packages, and project files.