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Pixel Bender Technology Center

Learning Pixel Bender

Check out these resources to get you started with Pixel Bender development and the Pixel Bender Toolkit.

Tutorial: Effects with the Pixel Bender Toolkit

Get an overview of what you can do with the Pixel Bender Toolkit by following this tutorial series by Kevin Goldsmith, engineering manager for the Adobe Image Foundation team in the Core Technology group:

Instructional presentations

In these tutorial presentations, Lee Brimelow shows you the basics of creating and exporting filters, and animating parameters of a filter:

• Introduction to Pixel Bender: Part 1 (basics of creating Pixel Bender filters)
• Introduction to Pixel Bender: Part 2 (exporting a Pixel Bender filter, loading it into Flash, and applying it to an image)
• Animating Pixel Bender filters (animating filter parameters using a tweening library)

Adobe TV also features some informative instructional videos on using Pixel Bender:

• Pixel Bender custom filters (Lee Brimelow, ADC Presents)
• Pixel Bender filters (Paul Burnett, Flash Downunder)
• Pixel Bender unleashed (Ryan Taylor, MAX 2008)

Pixel Bender and Adobe tools

For additional information on using Pixel Bender in Flash CS4 Professional, read Working with Pixel Bender shaders in Programming ActionScript 3 and Shader class in the ActionScript Component and Language Reference. This documentation contains a detailed description of the objects you can use with Pixel Bender in Flash CS4 Professional. Also read these articles in the Adobe Developer Connection:

• Pixel Bender basics for Flash (Charles Ward)
• Pixel Bender basics for Flex and AIR (Charles Ward)
• Using Pixel Bender with Flash Builder 4 beta as a number crunching engine (Elad Elrom)

Programming in Pixel Bender

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.

For more details, please download the Pixel Bender Toolkit, the Pixel Bender Developer's Guide, and the Pixel Bender Language Reference:

Pixel Bender Toolkit

This download provides the Pixel Bender Toolkit 1.5.1 for Macintosh and Windows. Installation and setup instructions are available within the Pixel Bender release notes.

• Pixel Bender Toolkit for Macintosh (DMG, 31 MB)
• Pixel Bender Toolkit for Windows (ZIP, 33.4 MB)

Pixel Bender documentation

These files provide more information about the Pixel Bender language and how to use the Pixel Bender kernel and graph languages to develop filters:

• Pixel Bender Language Reference (PDF, 311 KB)
• Pixel Bender Developer's Guide (PDF, 1.1 MB)

Pixel Bender Plug-in for Photoshop CS4

This download provides the Pixel Bender Plug-in for Photoshop CS4 on 32-bit Macintosh and Windows systems and 64-bit Windows systems. Installation and setup instructions are available within the Pixel Bender release notes.

• Plug-in for Photoshop CS4 – 32-bit Macintosh and Windows (MXP, 21.5 MB)
• Plug-in for Photoshop CS4 – 64-bit Windows (MXP, 7.2 MB)