Mark Barbieri captured rollercoaster video using a GoPro camera, then ran Photoshop’s Pixel Bender Oil Painting filter on the clip. “The idea,” he writes, “is that as we ride through the launch building, we transition from the real world to a fantasy world.” I like it.

Tangential: He used the After Effects Warp Stabilizer on a clip from the same ride, though not on the one above. “For reasonably stable video with an annoying amount of wandering,” he writes, “I’ve found it to be miraculous. It was worth the price of the upgrade to CS5.5 by itself.”

Adobe’s Pixel Bender technology enables fast, GPU- and multicore-savvy filters to run in Photoshop, Flash, and After Effects. Now the Pixel Bender Technology Center provides one-stop access to a large variety of resources, including download of the PB plug-in Photoshop CS4. For more links, see engineering manager Kevin Goldsmith’s blog.

A new version of the Pixel Bender Toolkit, used for writing imaging filters that run super fast in Photoshop, Flash, and After Effects, is available for download from Adobe Labs. Engineering manager Kevin Goldsmith writes,

This new version includes the ability to edit, compile and run Pixel Bender Graphs (supported in Photoshop and After Effects). It also has a number of bug fixes, specifically in areas around PBJ generation.

If you’ve haven’t yet grabbed the PB Gallery plug-in for Photoshop CS4, you might want to do so as it lets you run an ever-growing set of very fast filters. (Plus, we’d like to get your feedback on where to take it in the future.) I’ve collected lots of PB-related resources & links here.

• The always inventive Mario Klingemann has created a pair of interesting pieces:
  • Feedback couples motion tracking with a Web cam + Pixel Bender. He’s uploaded a set of screenshots created with the app. (It makes me look like a bad hallucination out of Natural Born Killers.)
  • Passing By is a “meditative piece which uses copyright-free images from the Flickr Commons project to generate a never-repeating illusion.”
• Lee Felarca does on-the-fly green-screening with your Web cam.
• The new Pixel Bender Explorer AIR app that demonstrates how to apply PB animations & effects to your JavaScript-based AIR applications. [Via]

• Pixel Bender engineering manager Kevin Goldsmith rounds up some great instructional videos on Adobe TV.

• David Lenaerts has created “Farbe,” a very cool watercolor painting simulation that runs in Flash thanks to Pixel Bender.
• Disney artist Stef Kardos shares a whole series of paintings made on an iPhone, created via the natural media app Brushes. Here’s a speed painting demo showing it off. [Via]
• I’ve always dug Miltos Manetas’s Flash-based Jackson Pollock drawing toy (all 8kb of it). Now he’s bringing the same features to the iPhone, adding support for multitouch painting & the accelerometer.

To give developers more time to write killer code, the folks at NVIDIA have extended the Pixel Bender contest deadline to Feb. 28.  For more info (links to dev tools, etc.), see previous.

By the way a couple of developers have pointed out that contest entry is restricted to US residents.  I don’t know why that is, and hopefully it’s something that can get changed.  (The same limitation has popped up in various Adobe contests.  I don’t know why it does, but everyone agrees that it sucks & would like to change it.)

Elsewhere, Paul Burnett shared some more PB coolness: a spinnable globe (complete with source) featuring a spherize filter + throw physics, as well as the bizarre Dancing Dudes demo (see screenshot).  (Me, I would’ve gone with some vintage Rockwell for the soundtrack.)

And one more thing: Adobe announced today that Flash Player 10–needed to run Pixel Bender in a browser–is now installed on more than half the Net-connected PCs & Mac in the world, and that’s after just two months of availability.  If you think browser-based image editors like Photoshop.com are powerful now, wait til they really start embracing PB.

• Pixel Bender engineering manager Kevin Goldsmith rounds up a whole set of PB experiments. David Lenaerts’s smoke sim makes me long to reinvent what it means to paint in Photoshop.
• Brooks Andrus shows off the performance of Pixel Bender in Flash Player 10, letting you choose from a set of filters to run on video in real time.
• Adobe evangelist Paul Burnett demonstrates how to use PB filters in Flash.
• And, of course, there’s still time to enter the NVIDIA-sponsored Pixel Bender creation contest.

Rich Tretola has created FotoBooth 2, a free Adobe AIR app that applies Pixel Bender effects on the fly to data coming in from your Web cam.  To check it out, make sure you’ve installed AIR 1.5, then download FotoBooth.  (Here’s a deeply unflattering screenshot.)

The app idea & features aren’t new–in fact, it’s nearly a clone of Apple’s Photo Booth–but it’s neat to see how the Flash/AIR platform has evoloved.  All these fast Pixel Bender effects could be run in Photoshop via the free Pixel Bender plug-in for CS4.

By the way, in case you missed it over the break, NVIDIA is sponsoring a Pixel Bender creation contest.  Give it a shot and win some great loot.

Feel like winning an Alienware Area-51 PC, or perhaps one of several NVIDIA Quadro CX graphics cards?  Then get cranking creating some killer Pixel Bender code for use in Photoshop, Flash, and After Effects.  Here’s the official blurb:

NVIDIA and Adobe are joining forces to encourage artists and developers to write Adobe® Pixel Bender™ Kernels for Adobe Creative Suite® 4. The first place winner will receive an Alienware Area-51 Personal Computer. Category winners will receive a NVIDIA Quadro CX graphics card. The categories are coolest Pixel Bender kernel, most useful Pixel Bender kernel in the Adobe Photoshop® workflow, and most technically compelling.

 

Contest entries will be accepted from January 1st 2009 – January 31st 2009. Afterwards, all entries will be open for viewing at nzone.com.

For some guidance on jumping in, you might want to check out the "Creating Effects With Pixel Bender" MAX Lab materials posted by Kevin Goldsmith, engineering mgr. for Pixel Bender.  Other resources:

• Contest official site
• PB plug-in for Photoshop & PB Toolkit (for running & writing PB filters)
• PB forum (ask questions, exchange ideas, etc.)
• PB Exchange (download samples to run in PS, AE, and Flash)

At Photoshop World I demonstrated Photoshop running a plug-in that houses Pixel Bender, Adobe’s new cross-platform, cross-application technology for running filters silly fast on GPUs & CPUs.  Because it also runs in the upcoming Flash Player 10 (due in conjunction with CS4) and in After Effects, I expect Pixel Bender to usher in a whole new era for Photoshop filters.  It radically lowers the barrier to entry (all you need is a text editor–which Adobe happens to provide)–and did I mention that it’s fast?

I’m seeing plenty of interesting examples popping up online.  To check them out you need to install the Flash Player 10 beta.

• Petri Leskinen is cranking out interesting experiments, including a crazy tunnel test. [Via Mike Chambers]
• Frank Reitberger has made cool fisheye and smudge (or what I’d call "The Chuck Close Effect") filters.

• Flash 3D expert Mr. Doob has posted a number of examples; I like rays in particular.
• Adobe’s Lee Brimelow has posted a pair of PB creation tutorials and an interactive sample, while Mike Chambers shows how to build ActionScript libraries of PB filters.
• More samples can be downloaded from the Adobe Exchange.

A couple of other notes:

• Kind of a technicality: Pixel Bender won’t be supported in the box in the next version of Photoshop, but we plan to offer a PB plug-in as a free download when CS4 ships.  Therefore it’s effectively part of the release.
• I expect the ability to run filter in the Flash Player to have a big impact on what Flash-based RIAs like Photoshop Express can do.

Earlier today I found myself over at NVIDIA, demoing some of the new OpenGL-accelerated Photoshop technology we’ve got cooking in the labs.  The latest GPUs are just crazy-fast, and it’s a great pleasure to see a 2-gigabyte, 442-Megapixel Photoshop file gliding around like buttah*.

Adobe’s efforts to take advantage of the GPU certainly aren’t confined to Photoshop.  In a short video on Adobe Labs, Flash Player PM Justin Everett-Church demonstrates Pixel Bender filters running in Flash Player 10.  If you’ve installed the FP10 beta, you can play with Pixel Bender yourself in this interactive demo.  It comes pre-loaded with some cool (and very fast) filters, and you can grab more from the Pixel Bender exchange.  If you want to experiment further, check out documentation from Adobe’s Lee Brimelow.

On a slightly tangential note (using the shipping Flash Player 9, not FP10/Pixel Bender), Robert Lewis & co. of Fashion Buddha have created "dynamic
transitions that arrange the byte arrays of the images and then re-compress them as JPEGs – all within Flash.  By displaying a sequence of
these byte-tweaked images quickly we can create an effect similar to
an old TV tuner that badly needs to be adjusted. The glitch effect is
subtle by default, but can be increased using the slider in the menu."  I can’t wait to see what these guys can accomplish with FP10 & Pixel Bender.

* Incidentally, to the folks recently carping that nothing meaningful ever improves in Photoshop, I’d submit that expending a heck of a lot of energy to make the display of every single pixel faster and smoother is, well, *rather meaningful*.  Effort really doesn’t get more fundamental, or more broadly useful, than that.

[Update: Flash Player engineer Tinic Uro gives a detailed overview of Adobe Pixel Bender in Flash Player 10 Beta. Pixel Bender code runs well on a GPU or CPU, and FP10 introduces more GPU support, but it doesn’t run Pixel Bender code on the GPU.]

No, it’s not a low-res portrait of an "alcoholic, whore-mongering, chain-smoking gambler"; rather, "Pixel Bender" is the official name for Adobe’s new scripting language for writing fast imaging filters.  Engineering manager Kevin Goldsmith explains,

Hydra is an awesome name for a language like the one we created. At the very beginning, Jonathan Shekter came up with it as a code name for this cool language that could run on different kinds of hardware efficiently. The problem is that it’s a great name for any kind of technology that does multiple things, so it is pretty popular. We didn’t want to confuse folks, so we worked with the Adobe branding team to come up with a new name that we could use moving forward. That name is Pixel Bender™.

As someone whose mind was blown by the original MacPaint, I was pushing for "Phat Bits"–a fun way to combine a reference to the old-school "Fat bits" display mode with an equally dated bit of 90’s slang.  But hey, they don’t pay me to come up with the marvels of Adobe branding.

Developers wanting to take Hyd–er, Pixel Bender–for a spin can grab the coding & preview environment from Adobe Labs.

Time for an update to The Greatest Technology You Don’t Care About… Yet. 🙂

Engineering manager Kevin Goldsmith has announced that a new version of the Adobe Image Foundation (AIF) Toolkit Preview Release is available for download from Adobe Labs.

Think of AIF as similar to Apple’s Core Image technology (running really fast filters on your graphics card), but with added goodness.  For one thing, in addition to working in desktop tools like After Effects and (maybe, someday, I’m not sayin’) Photoshop and others, AIF will work in the next version of the incredibly ubiquitous Flash Player.  So…

AIF = Fast-as-hell filters on every desktop, everywhere

In addition to opening tons of doors for Flash animators, it’ll give the Flash Platform a huge bump in its ability to support apps like Photoshop Express.  And it’ll encourage lots of cool cross-pollination, as developers can leverage the imaging code they write for Flash in order to create filters for Adobe desktop apps, and vice versa.

Back to the news at hand: the Toolkit helps developers write and test their imaging code in a scripting language codenamed “Hydra” (real name TBA).  If that sounds like your bag, head over to Labs, grab the build, and try out & share examples in the gallery.

Greetings from the show floor at Adobe MAX*.  During the keynote yesterday, the Flash team revealed some really interesting news–what I think may be the sleeper announcement of the show: the Flash Player is being equipped to run Hydra, a new graphics programming language from Adobe. [Update: You can see the technology demoed in this video, starting around 5:30.]

Instead of running just the built-in drop shadows, blurs, etc. that were added in version 8, Flash (and by extension Adobe AIR) will now be able to run an essentially unlimited number of imaging effects.  Hydra is tuned to run ridiculously fast on modern graphics cards (GPUs), and it’ll be tuned for multi-core CPUs as well.  You can download a free beta of the Adobe Image Foundation (AIF) Toolkit from Labs and get started creating your own Hydra-based filters.

Here’s a key point, though: the same Hydra technology is being used to power the fast filters in After Effects CS3.  Therefore an AE plug-in developer could effectively also develop runtime effects for Flash, while a Flash developer could leverage her work inside AE.  And wouldn’t it be something if that same work could run in other Adobe apps that crunch pixels (I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’…).

Here are some quick screenshots of Hydra running inside the AIF Toolkit, which allows you to write & preview code in one environment.  Developers have already started to share their code, and AIF/Hydra engineering manager Kevin Goldsmith has posted a bit more info on his blog.  Kevin will talk through the engineering details in a 3pm session tomorrow at MAX (see below).

[Update: Mario Klingemann has uploaded some screenshots of his experiments plus info on his blog. [Via]  Elsewhere, Flash Player engineer Tinic Uro shares details & code on his blog.]

[Update 2: Kevin has just uploaded his slide deck from MAX, featuring example filters, code walkthroughs, and more.]

*The WiFi here is free, but you get what you pay for, and I haven’t gotten it to work all day.  Therefore I’ve surreptitiously snagged an Ethernet cable out of the back of one of these “PDF Kiosks.”  Guerilla blogging at its finest…