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ADOBE.GIF Adobe Releases Pixel Bender
By Mike Pasini, The Imaging Resource
(Monday, November 17, 2008 - 10:48 EST)

CS4 plug-in accelerates filters by using the Graphics Processing Unit and multi-core CPUs

Adobe has released its free Pixel Bender plug-in, which "provides automatic runtime optimization on heterogeneous hardware" to run Photoshop filters much faster than they have ever been run before. The CS4-compatible release is available now on Adobe Labs.

According to the company, "Pixel Bender is best suited for the kind of algorithms in which processing of any pixel has minimum dependence on the values of other pixels. For example, you can efficiently write a kernel to manipulate brightness of the image because brightness of each pixel can be changed independently. You would not want to use Pixel Bender to compute a histogram, because a histogram requires the values of all the pixels in an image."

It supports parallel processing (including multi-core and multiprocessor systems) and supports all bit-depths from 8-bit through 32-bit channels.

Photoshop Product Manager John Nack has produced a one minute demo of the plug-in in action. Because the Pixel Bender toolkit allows people to write filters in Flash, Nack predicts "an explosion in the number of new Photoshop filters becoming available."

He added that the plug-in has the same GPU requirements as Photoshop CS4. "The more memory on your card, the larger the images you can process with it."

Filter developers will find details about the toolkit on Engineering Manager Kevin Goldsmith's blog.

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