Goodbye Pixel Bender

Seems like support for Pixel Bender was phased out in CS6. There's some explanation here: http://forums.adobe.com/message/4395440

It's "very true" though I kinda went "aww."

Sorry, But I think the news is incomplete and can be misleading

Because is not true that Pixel Bender dies or is a really a good bye for CS6.

The real news is that this ONLY is true for After Effects CS6 BUT not true for Photoshop CS6, and they seem to give even more support and make a bigger pixel bender community in the near future for filters for Photoshop Pixel bender plugin.

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This is a bad news for After Effects owners and users as this was a very good, interesting and useful plugin that gave results that you could not make with any other software or in any other way.

I have never used Pixel Bender for After Effects but have seen many amazing examples that are available and is really bad that this will not be supported anymore in After Effects CS6.

BUT anyway not ALL is lost, as you will be able to continue using it in After Effects CS5 although now is probably that there will be no more new filters added for after effects.

Well, I guess that's good for FF!

Its been 2 or 3 months now since I posted this ... wonder if anybody found a way to run PixelBender still. Otherwise half my little pixelbender stuff will probably not work with the newest versions. I'm ditching CS5 soon since I need to move on with the software.

But yeah... the ultimate and the most painful goodbye and hello filterforge again.

Yeah, I think I was using PixelBender because it was easy to program simple things in it. I don't know C++ and stuff so it's impossible for me to do Hardcoded work which is why I deal with things like processing as well. But I felt PixelBender (regardless of its GPU-based functionality) was just nice because we got to make our own little things.

But Adobe was right, it's a hefty piece of program that takes more than it needs. I wasn't doing too much in PixelBender itself so going from PB to FilterForge isn't bad at all. It's like in Pixelbender I had some conversion scripts for data and otherwise really dumb things.

Actually PixelBender runs slower on some systems because it relies on the GPU. Under my experience 80% or 90% don't have great GPUs and don't care if they do have wonderful things, so giving them a PixelBender script was like fail. Just runs like super slow on their machines anyway and it also takes up resources that they can't do anything about. So I just suggested FilterForge and it runs much smoother and renders faster too. I mean most people have decent CPUs with the most basic package they get. So distribution wise, PixelBender wasn't that great anyway. (least in my opinion)

I have CS6 already I just need to upgrade stuff

[Warning: originally part-written for a blog. This is a long post!! I'm super sorry ]

It's pretty unfortunate yeah. Adobe basically quit PixelBender over fully C++ hard-coded plugins. Least according to the last message I read about PixelBender, the whole reason why they even stopped was part because they were taking more resources for development, so the line was cut.

So it's actually quite sad but there's probably no chance of it returning. And if it does, I'll be happy but the rest of the world would have moved on. It must have been a pretty tough but obvious business decision as much of PixelBender didn't really catch so much interest and development amongst developers. This is why you barely see PixelBender based stuff out there.

Regarding PixelBender's plugins and speeds, most of them are relatively simple so they run relatively smooth on older GPUs. No issue with that. The issues begin with large images, complex filters, and older GPUs. There are texture-size limits on GPUs so naturally as image scales went up calculating stuff in realtime does become clunky. (People like Subblue took PixelBender to other limits too, but those had limits as well.) Ever since this GPU movement, most people whose computers are 5 years and older have been kinda left behind in the dark. So there's a huge disappointed crowd of people left behind with their softwares unless they upgrade their hardware which is an extra cost. In fact, that's a majority of the people out there whose computers are technically incapable of handling anywhere near CS6.

As for compatibility, the AfterEffects community just got a 3rd-party developer plugin called PixelBender Kernel Accelerator which allows pbk files to run on AfterEffects as GLSL. It's pretty fast, in fact slightly faster than PixelBender itself. You can only hope there's some 3rd party developer out there nice enough to spend time and resources to make plugins like that, but while I keep hopes high for them, I have doubts because the PixelBender community has been relatively small and in some ways "going obsolete." <--- this is the truthful sad part that sucks.

While some people would rub it in Adobe's face that they should least bring CS6 support for PixelBender, which I still hope it may happen, I feel extremely pessimistic about Adobe's further involvement with something they decided to quit already. I only find myself being sympathetic but at the same time it's kinda like a decision where it forces us users to move on.

- Chapter 2: Skybase's thoughts on the current trend of GPU-based art-tools and not games -

On the other hand I'm still using stuff like QuartzComposer and I'm getting the feeling THAT'S going to go too in favor of stuff like C++ or CoreImage alone (stringing together patches isn't necessary great) which again makes sense. The sad-but-true point that I keep finding myself is this: there's a market out there that's confused with GPU-based image editing. As a company, you can tell everybody to upgrade the software, but it's hard to get people to upgrade the hardware (even if its cheap). So when you develop GPU-based art-tools you have to basically think twice about whether if you should leave behind a huge crowd of people or develop it specifically for people with a decent GPU. It's easier to introduce new software with specific hardware specifications, but with software that's been developed over years and years with hundreds and thousands and millions of users, you can't easily ask people to just pump their hardware up a notch. Products like Photoshop have to be compatible with quite a lot of hardware.

And maybe there are moments where we'd want to break the rules and just throw something that only 20% of the market can use. But like with anything, you need to find the right time. I feel as though, even if all this GPU stuff is impressive, the market isn't fully ready to take it ALL in.

What I may say here maybe inaccurate, but it's basically where I feel as though we're at right now as we head forth with the mobile industry. I'm not necessary a coder, but as an technical artist and art director of (ahem) my own little studio, I keep a good eye on the market in hopes of finding something we can utilize to creatively expand what we make. PixelBender was just one of them. It's an ever changing field folks, you just can't stick with one technology forever.

TLDR: PixelBender was a great tool but it didn't do well in the market so Adobe quit on it in favor of something better.