New Pixel Bender Plugin Expands Photoshop Filter Selection
It maybe overlooked on a day when Adobe mapped out plans to overhaul Flash for mobile devices, but the company had another announcement today, of special interest to web developers: the new Pixel Bender Plugin for PhotoShop CS4.
Pixel Bender is a new platform that allows developers to create and share image filter and effects. Pixel Bender creations began life in Flash and it’s the technology behind many special effects in online photo editing apps.
But the underlying framework has moved beyond its Flash beginnings and is now part of several applications, including Photoshop CS4.
That means that all the filters Flash developers have created will now work inside Photoshop CS4 (and After Effects CS4) and, more importantly, it means we’ll likely see a significant increase in the number of filters available.
Like the default filters included with Photoshop, Pixel Bender tools allow you extend the Photoshop interface and create custom effects. The main difference from the filter system that’s long been a part of Photoshop, is that Pixel Bender filters will work in other apps with no additional effort on your part.
And don’t think that Pixel Bender filters are the red-headed stepchild of Photoshop filters, quite the opposite, they’re the future. The filters are very fast — though the speed will depend on your graphics card (GPU) — and much easier to develop than the older Photoshop-only interface.
Once you have the new plugin installed, just download the filters of your choice from Adobe Exchange and drop the PBK text files into the “Pixel Bender Files” folder that’s created in your Photoshop CS4 folder. To use a filter head to Filters->Pixel Bender->Pixel Bender Gallery and apply them to your images.
Adobe’s John Nack has a short demo movie that shows the new Pixel Bender Plugin in action. You can grab the plugin from the Adobe Labs page, but of course it’s experimental, so rough edges remain. It was perfectly stable in my (limited) testing, but the interface lacks the polish of other Photoshop panels.
Still, Pixel Bender filters are a diamond-in-the-rough release and we look forward to seeing what happens now that Photoshop fans can get in on the fun. At the moment there are nearly fifty filters available on the Adobe Exchange page, but look for that number to skyrocket in the near future.
[via John Nack]
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