Kevin Goldsmith

July 16, 2008

New Pixel Bender Toolkit release on Adobe Labs

Today we posted a new build of the Pixel Bender Toolkit, it is Preview Release #4.

No major changes in this one, lots of bug fixes and UI tweaks (many suggested by the users of the previous builds, thank you!).

Here is the link for downloading.

I'm always interested in hearing any problems that you encounter or features that you would like. Please post those in the forum or as comments on this post.

Also, if you are looking for cool filters to play with or you are looking for a place to share your Pixel Bender Kernels, don't forget the Pixel Bender Exchange.

June 25, 2008

MAX NA Experience launched, cool Pixel Bender sessions!

The MAX Experience website has launched, you can now get the list of sessions and schedule.

I was really excited to see a couple of Pixel Bender sessions being hosted by folks in the community...

More…

June 01, 2008

Talking to the Seattle Flash User's Group this month

On Tuesday, June 17th at 7pm, I'll be talking to the Flash User's Group in Seattle about Pixel Bender. The details are on their site.

May 23, 2008

Using Pixel Bender in Flash Player 10

Lee Brimelow has posted a code snippet to show you how to load Pixel Bender filters in your Flash projects at runtime. I expect a zillion fun Flash-based image and video processing apps to spring from this...

Tinic Uro has posted a really nice backgrounder on how Pixel Bender works in the Flash Player and how it is different from running in the Pixel Bender Toolkit. A must read if you want to understand the nitty gritty.

If you've got the Astro beta, you should check out the new version of the TubeView filter that Petri Leskinen wrote. This has been one of my favorite filters to demo with because of all the fun James Bond-ish possibilities...

May 21, 2008

the formatter in action!

I forgot to post the example! Here is the Fade To History kernel I posted yesterday, run through the formatter:

Pixel Bender HTML formatter

While the PRE tag is ok for displaying code, it always bores me. I like my code to look more interesting. When I was posting the code yesterday, I was asking around the company for formatting tips and I realized that it might be fun to do my own formatter, so I fired up Flex, read up on the String class and created the tool below. Usage is pretty simple, paste your code into the upper text box, hit the "Convert To HTML" button, see the text appear in the second text box and then hit the "Copy HTML to clipboard" button and paste into your blog or web page as raw (and very ugly) HTML code.

(sorry for the size, narrow blog templates)

May 20, 2008

the return of the Fade into history

<languageVersion: 1.0;>

kernel FadeToHistory
<   namespace : "Kevin's Tutorial Filters";
    vendor : "Kevin's Filters, Inc";
    version : 1;
    description : "Fade from color to B&W to sepia";
>
{
    parameter float crossfade
    < minValue: 0.0;
      maxValue: 2.0;
      defaultValue: 0.0;
    >;
    const float3 lumMult = float3(0.3, 0.59, 0.11);
    
    input image4 src;
    output pixel4 dst;
    
    void
    evaluatePixel()
    {
        dst = sampleNearest(src,outCoord());
        float luminance = dot(dst.rgb, lumMult);
        float3 sepia = float3( dst.r * 0.4 +
                               dst.g * 0.769 +
                               dst.b * 0.189,
                               dst.r * 0.349 +
                               dst.g * 0.686 +
                               dst.b * 0.168,
                               dst.r * 0.272 +
                               dst.g * 0.534 +
                               dst.b * 0.131 );
        
        float3 startMix = dst.rgb;
        float3 endMix = float3(luminance);
        float mixValue = crossfade;
        if ( crossfade > 1.0 )
        {
            // normalize mix value to the range of 0-1
            mixValue -= 1.0;
            startMix = float3(luminance);
            endMix = sepia;
        }
        dst.rgb = mix(startMix, endMix, mixValue);
    }
}

May 16, 2008

The Pixel Bender Exchange is now live!

Waay easier to post on than the Pixel Bender gallery wiki page...

We've primed the pump with some of the filters from the install of the toolkit and we'll add some more from the team soon.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=productHome&exc=26

or

http://www.adobe.com/go/pixelbender/

May 14, 2008

Astro Beta and new Pixel Bender Toolkit now available!

Big news tonight!

Finally, you don't have to just hear about Pixel Bender Filters and play with them in the toolkit, now you can actually try some of them out! The beta of Astro is now available. Check out the demos to see Pixel Bender Shaders running on images, vectors and video in real time!

Also, today we released a new Pixel Bender Toolkit on our new Pixel Bender wiki pages. What is new in this release? The new name, obviously, but also some bug fixes and some new features (check out the preferences dialog box!)

More info soon!