P: Please support PixelBender in CS6/CC

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Why pn earth would Adobe drop this hugely successful and uniqe set of plug-ins/filters! I know a lot of people are very unhappy about this. I really hope Adobe changes its mind and comes out with an upgrade/patch to fix this problem.

[creskdesign]

It would became quite a hilarious situation if we did the same to our clients.

Anyway, please allow me to think out loud. Do you think the PB plug-in could be ported to the Script Engine in some kind of way? We all know there are lots of developers capable of doing this.

[D_Cam]

Thanks for this Chris. It's nice to finally hear a voice on this. Seems as though it might be worthwhile to investigate what it would take for Adobe to recruit their own pixel-bender team, maybe acquire some from the old team, and if possible, the lead. The route pixel bender is using is the future in this area of design. I wouldn't dismiss it over such a setback.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

The other team wrote it, and a Photoshop engineer spent much of the product cycle getting it to work correctly. The PixelBender team was part of the core technologies group within Adobe.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Some of them left the company, and most are busy on other teams now. It's not that simple.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Products and features get end of life'd / discontinued all the time.
We don't like the situation much, either - but we really don't have much influence in this case.

PixelBender is not related to the script engine and not likely to be ported in such a way.

[c.pfaffenbichler]

Mr.Cox, I understand that this is not your responsibility but do you know if the technology has also been dropped from the other Adobe applications it worked for/with?

[screwdriver1]

I know it's far from ideal, but all here currently have CS5 on their machine so it's no biggie to keep it and run it just for this application. Come to think of it I have CS4 too.

Chris

[Toulouse Latrec]

So, Mr. Cox, after having shelled out many hundred $$ for CS6, you are saying that if I only spent another $500 on eBay for CS4 or CS5, I could then use PixelBender?
It's a solution, sir, but far, far from ideal.

[c.pfaffenbichler]

If you don’t already have CS4 or CS5 how did you get to know Pixel Bender?

Keep in mind that the Photoshop team made no promises on Pixel Bender prior to the CS6-release (as far as I know) as it was an Adobe Labs offering ... so I guess there was no necessity for them to even point out that it would be abandoned with CS6.

Let’s just hope a similar fate to Pixel Bender’s does not befall Configurator ...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I need suggestions for my Mac Pro OS X Lion 10.6.8
I want to buy photoshop. Should I wait until mountain Lion is issued and then get the photoshop program?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I can't comment on the plans of other teams/products.

[Toulouse Latrec]

Well, Christoph, I got to know Pixel Bender (even without having CS4 or CS5) by a little something called THE INTERNET.

[Norseman]

I am upgrading to a new computer and was going to move from CS3 to CS6--one of the main reasons was PB. Glad I'm only on the Trial version now. May have to look for a cheep 5.5!

[Mr. Kirkwood]

The oil-paint filter in CS6 is nothing like the PB oil-paint....

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Thank you all for your interest in and enthusiasm for Pixel Bender. Pixel Bender has been offered in the past on Adobe Labs as a technology preview. As of CS6, we're no longer providing Pixel Bender as a Labs technology. Photoshop CS6 has taken the Pixel Bender filter most popular with customers, Oil Paint, and turned it into an official feature in CS6. Photoshop CS6 no longer supports Pixel Bender for 3rd party development.

[editor6660]

So I just spent TONS of money to have adobe turn around and tell me that the Pixel Bender Plug in doesn't work any more?????? WTF? Why do companies do this??? I'm getting increasingly sick of them doing this in general. Don't bring something in, have us enjoy it, work with photos using it, THEN tell us that your not supporting any more in the next version of your program. That's just nuts! And I'm finding it happening with more and more products!!! Not good!!!!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Pixel Bender was never a feature of Photoshop, it was just a research project hosted on the labs site. And the management of the team that developed it did not feel that there was enough demand to justify it's continued development. The team has since been broken up and moved on to other things.

[editor6660]

I can appreciate that the TEAM may have been broken up, but that's a poor excuse for not continuing a plug in. If things like that are going to happen, then why bother at all. In this day and age where people base there work on something that works, I find it very inexcusable that the answer is as trite as you present it.
In the future I may just look for alternatives to photoshop...

Thanks for your reply, though.
Christo

[Norseman]

I just found the Pixel Bender Took Kit 2 on Adobe's site. But don't know enough about the old integrated into PS 4 & 5 version to tell if this will still do the things that some of the PB artists have been doing. Anyone that's more savy want to look at it and let us know. I looks like you can build filters and run them with the Took Kit.
??????

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

You hold Photoshop responsible for something that was never part of Photoshop? PixelBender was just a research project/technology preview from another team. We wanted PixelBender, and spent a lot of time helping that team get their plugin up to a quality needed for shipping. But we couldn't control the management of that team.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

When are you going to have Pixel Bender for CS6? We really need and want that! I was very disgruntled when I found out it wasn't there.

[Norseman]

Guess this topic is dead. Official "word" (see above) is Pixel Bender is dead also.

[mselbach2]

It's really disappointing that there is no real alternative for creating custom math based pixel equotations in photoshop besides convolution. There are tools for this like java based ImageJ but that's just not photoshop with all its professionallity and speed. Photoshop scripting is really powerfull but there is just no way to get access to the pixel level. Pixelbender with all its limitations gave us a chance to fill this gap.
Maybe the team could provide us scientific and developer guys with a filter template
so that we are able to build and run our algorithms agains our images on the pixel level without diving into the depth of the sdk?
I suspect that the focus on GPU is one reason that made updating the plugin too expensive. But to play with my pixels I personally would have been satisfied with a running CPU only version updated to CS6.

Regards,
Markus

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Have you looked at the Matlab integration with Photoshop?

And you can just modify one of the examples from the SDK and have you math up and running in a matter of minutes.

[c.pfaffenbichler]

»And you can just modify one of the examples from the SDK and have you math up and running in a matter of minutes.«
I wonder if that estimate may not be overly optimistic for most of us Photoshop users.