In April, software publisher MetaCreations sold all its graphics products, including Kai's Photo Soap, Super Goo, and PowerShow. The good news is that ScanSoft bought the programs and has bundled them into a $29.95 cross-platform package that combines fun with practicality.
Like other programs in the Factory series, Kai's Photo Soap 2 is shipped in Mac OS and Windows versions on the same disc. Soap 2 replaces the previous version's "rooms" interface with soft, white textured backgrounds and Easter egg-colored highlights.
Clickable tabs let you move back and forth between Organize, Clean, Compose, Album, and Print functions. Organize lets you acquire images from digital cameras, scanners, or your hard drive. You can view thumbnails of the files that look like slides; organize them by size, color, or date; and assign them keywords, just as in an image-base program. Clean lets you apply real-world tools, allowing you
to fix red-eye problems, straighten a skewed scan, or adjust brightness, contrast, tone, or color. In Compose, you can add text or clip art to an image to produce some lightweight desktop-publishing projects.
When finished, you can arrange all of your cleaned and composed pictures into digital albums. Print lets you output images or projects, but you can also export album pages as Web pages for display on your Web site.
On a 350MHz Windows computer, performance was modest, if not sluggish.
Kai's Super Goo 1.5 provides an even better-looking and more functional interface than the Goo plug-in that's part of KPT Power Tools 6 (which was sold to Corel). As in the last version, the program's controls are displayed as two arc-shaped, rainbow-colored rows of dots that remind me way too much of M&Ms. The first set of dots contains effects that you can brush onto the image. These controls are labeled: Grow/Shrink, Move, Smear, Smudge, Nudge, Mirror, Toggle, Smooth, and Ungoo. The second set applies effects to the entire photograph. Clicking on either toolset enlarges the effects to surround your photograph.
The best way to experience KPG's tools is to click and drag your mouse around. You will find that this experimentation quickly turns into the digital equivalent of finger painting. Give your kids some photographs of Mom and Dad and cut them loose with Super Goo. They will be entertained way beyond the modest cost of the package. I could quibble about having to keep the program CD in the drive while running it (a form of copy protection), but I'm not that kind of Grinch.
Kai's PowerShow 1.5 is a presentation package that lets you combine photographs with effects and sound to produce on-screen slide shows. After collecting and sorting images, you can add transition effects, text, and sound clips to each frame in the show. PowerShow offers 65 different transition effects and 100 sound effects. You can add title slides to your show, and there are 20 templates and 100 background presets for titles, bullet points, or any other text you might want to include. While PowerShow doesn't provide PowerPoint's flexibility, it's more than adequate for the average SOHO or home user.
