Kai Krause

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Kai Krause, approx. 2009

Kai Krause (born March 14, 1957 in Dortmund ) is a German software developer, designer of human-machine interfaces and musician. He became known in the early 1990s for the publication of a number of tips and tricks for the image processing program Adobe Photoshop , from which a filter collection was created as plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop in 1992 . In the following years his companies HSC, MetaTools and MetaCreations presented numerous graphics programs, the common feature of which was an innovative user interface .

Life

Krause attended the Carl-Humann-Gymnasium in Essen and moved to California in 1976 at the age of 19 . There he first delved into the areas of electronic music and dealt with synthesizers and vocoders . On behalf of Fritz Sennheiser , he brokered the Sennheiser VSM 201 vocoder, for which he wrote the manual, to Hollywood productions and musicians. He worked on about 30 music albums and films and won a Clio Award in 1980 for the sound effects for a radio spot for the first Star Trek movie . In 1982 he sold a VSM-201 to the musician Neil Young . He instructed Frank Zappa , Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder how it worked.

Krause was a co-owner of the software companies HSC, MetaTools and MetaCreations . He left the company in 1999 and moved back to Germany the following year and moved into Rheineck Castle near Bad Breisig am Rhein. He has lived in Salzburg since 2018.

software

Kai Krause (left) introduces Bryce at a computer fair (around 1995)

In the early 1990s, Krause developed a collection of image processing filters ( plug-ins ) from his little Photoshop tips , 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 established by HSC Software Corp. developed and marketed, which was renamed MetaTools in 1995 . In 1997 the new company MetaCreations emerged from this merger with Fractal Design . MetaTools products included graphics programs such as Kai's Power Tools, Bryce , Poser and Kai's Power GOO . The programs Painter , LivePicture , Raydream , InfiniD , Kai's Power Show and Kai's Photo Soap were added under MetaCreations . The programs developed by Krause's company were characterized by their aesthetically pleasing and, at the time, unfamiliar user interfaces.

Meaning and effect

Krause realized several projects in the 1990s with artists such as Douglas Adams , Peter Gabriel and the physicist Stephen Hawking . Krause holds a Masters degree (hc) from the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara , California (1996) and an honorary doctorate from the University of Essen (1999). The Time Magazine honored him in 1997 as leader of the future, Newsweek described him as one of the 50 most influential thinkers of the next decade. In February 2005 he was named one of the top 15 innovators of the last 15 years by the DEMO conference.

swell

  1. ↑ mprove: "Kai's Power Tips & Tricks for Adobe Photoshop"
  2. ↑ zeit.de: "The Lord of the Landscapes" by Detlef Borchers, edition 30/1995
  3. ↑ Dave Tompkins: How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks, Chicago / Brooklyn, 2010.
  4. ↑ mprove: The interface of Kai Krause's software, seminar paper by Matthias Müller-Prove, 1999

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Krause, Kai
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German software pioneer
DATE OF BIRTH March 14, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH Dortmund