Adobe Pixel Bender is a technology that delivers a common image and video processing infrastructure with an automatic runtime optimization on heterogeneous hardware. Pixel bender kernel language can used for implementing image processing algorithms in a hardware independent manner. The Pixel Bender graph language is an XML-based language for combining individual pixel-processing operations (kernels) into more complex Pixel Bender filters. The Pixel Bender Toolkit includes the Pixel Bender kernel language and graph language, the Pixel Bender Toolkit IDE (an integrated development environment for Pixel Bender), sample filters, and documentation.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.
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:
- Part 1: Creating a new filter
- Part 2: Creating a vintage tone filter
- Part 3: Adding parameters to filters
- Part 4: Sampling multiple pixels
- Part 5: Applying a filter to an image in Flash
- Part 6: Modifying Pixel Bender parameters in Flash
- Part 7: Improving the displacement filter
- Part 8: Controlling the displacement filter with mouse positioning
- Part 9: Integrating multiple image sources with a Pixel Bender kernel
- Part 10: Using a multiple-input filter as a blend shader.
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
