Kai's Photo Soap SE,  Clean Up Your Image.

Kai’s Photo Soap was a brainchild of the German photo editing guru and software designer Kai Krause. Released by MetaTools in mid 1997, with the tagline “Clean up your image”, Photo Soap came after graphics software such as Kai’s Power Tools and Kai’s Power Goo.

Soap was developed specifically for Windows 95 and could not run in the previous Windows 3.1 or 3.11 versions. Soap also demanded a Pentium processor and at least 16MB of RAM, or in the case of Apple a Power Macintosh.

As its marketing tagline implied, Soap specialised in rectifying flaws or deficiencies in photos rather than heavily manipulating them or changing their content. It was good at turning a thirty or forty year old photo into something that looks like it was taken yesterday. It is very simple and fast, without layers so the user paints every modification directly onto the photo. Brush size change automatically as you zoom in or out on the image.

Colour and contrast controls were similar to Curves and HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness), but  represented in a graphic equaliser format for easier control. It was divided into seven separate workspaces, known as Rooms, and easily selectable from a mouseover map. To make colour adjustments, you go to the Color Room. To make tone adjustments, you go to the Tone Room. To repair flaws, do clones or perform smoothing, you go to the Detail Room, so much more accessible to beginners.
In the late 1990s, the UK photographic retailer Jessops sold it for £19.95, and gave it away free with any digital camera or scanner whose undiscounted price was over £250. 

Platform: Apple Power Macintosh 16Mb RAM Hard Disk CD-ROM

                OS: Mac OS System 9

Application Software (AS:) Graphics

Version: SE

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