Kai Krause
Kai Krause ( born March 14, 1957 in Dortmund ) is a German software developer, designer, human - machine interfaces and musicians. He became known in the early 1990s by publishing a series of tips and tricks to the image editing program Adobe Photoshop, from 1992 was a collection of filters as plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop. In the following years, presented his company HSC, MetaTools and MetaCreations before many graphics programs, whose common feature was an innovative user interface.
Life
Krause visited the Carl- Humann -Gymnasium in Essen and moved in 1976 at the age of 19 to California. There he first delved into the areas of electronic music and dealt with synthesizers and vocoders. He participated in about 30 music albums and films and won a Clio Award in 1980 for the sound effects to a radio spot of the first Star Trek movie.
Krause was co-owner of the software company HSC, MetaTools and MetaCreations. In 1999 he left the company and moved the following year to return to Germany. Since then, he lives on Rheineck Castle near Bad Breisig on the Rhine.
Software
Krause developed in the early 1990s from his little Photoshop Tips is a collection of image processing filters ( plug- ins), which he called Kai's Power Tools and marketed as a separate product. The " KPT " plug-ins have been extremely successful and profitable in the computer graphics industry.
KPT was initially started by the HSC Software Corp.. developed and marketed, which was renamed in MetaTools 1995. 1997 arose from it by fusion with fractal design the new company MetaCreations. Among the products the company MetaTools included graphic programs such as Kai's Power Tools, Bryce, Poser and Kai's Power GOO. Under MetaCreations then were added to the programs Painter, Live Picture, Raydream, InfiniD, Kai's Power Show and Kai 's Photo Soap. Developed by Krause's business programs were characterized by aesthetically pleasing and at that time unfamiliar user interfaces.
Meaning and effect
Krause realized in the 1990s, several projects with artists such as Douglas Adams, Peter Gabriel and the physicist Stephen Hawking. Krause has a master's degree ( hc ) of the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, California (1996) and leads the honorary doctorate from the University of Essen (1999). Time magazine honored him in 1997 as leader of the future, Newsweek called him one of the 50 most influential thinkers of the coming decade. In February 2005, he was honored by the DEMO Conference as one of the top 15 innovators of the last 15 years.