SG... wrote:

 

I think it ultimately came down to not having the demand to justify the necessary resources to keep it moving along.

well your management really has it with demand.... right?

i heard the same excuse about 16/32 bit filter support.. for all filters in PS.

maybe you should invite some of the managers into this forum.. so they KNOW what is demanded.

http://forums.adobe.com/message/4283357#4283357

SG..., someone at yesterday's Connect session asked about Pixel Bender, and one of the Adobe folks there said sure, it would be available as a download.

Do some of you have different information than others?

-Noel

This is bad news. It's a great plugin but for those of us that only can only afford laptops without separate graphic cards on them we're out of luck. It literally won't run or open up using ram from your motherboard. Like someone said early a person will have to go back and forth to CS5 or buy a laptop with a graphic card, which I can't afford right now.

I and a lot of other people are REALLY REALLY hoping Adobe will reconcider its decision to kill the Pixel Bender plug-in.  It's a gem.  How could Adobe possibly benefit by not making CS6 and Pixel Bender compatible?

Repp7 wrote:

 

How could Adobe possibly benefit by not making CS6 and Pixel Bender compatible?

That's a great question.

Given that they've embraced the GPU all the more in this new version, and that they ported one of the Pixel Bender plug-ins to become the provided Oil Paint filter (which is good fun to use, by the way), it is a bit hard to imagine that Pixel Bender is deprecated.  Perhaps it just causes too many service calls and Adobe feels the downside is too great.  I wonder how they judge the value to customers (which is fairly intangible to say the least) against their support costs - that can't be easy.

I have no direct experience with Pixel Bender myself, though I have developed my own GPU-capable plug-in framework independently, so I do know that it's not an insignificant amount of code!  Mine has Zoom and Hand tools though. 

In any case it's certainly a good idea to keep the prior version of Photoshop around.

-Noel

my cs5 closes wenever i try to use pixel blender...can u help me w this? im using 64 bit windows ultimate...tnx...Godbless

Tiago, this forum is more about the Photoshop CS6 beta, which WILL ultimately solve your problem , but I'll see if I can help...

First thing I'd do is to visit the web site of the maker of your video card, and get the latest display driver for your hardware and OS.  Display driver updates solve many problems.

-Noel

That really is disappointing!  I'm not alone in hoping that Adobe will still change it's mind and make CS6 compatable with Pixel Bender.  It's a gem of a program, and there are a lot of people that will want to continue using it.

We may have seen the "golden age" of computing come and go already, where complex, high-powered software that requires more than minimal knowledge to work is avaialable to those who are willing to put in the effort. 

Support costs for things that don't "just work" must be high, because virtually everyone in the software industry seems generally to be eliminating expert "geek" stuff and pushing more mass-produced, pre-packaged, dumbed-down systems and applications.  I'm sorry for stepping on any Adobe toes here.

The modern trend is moving toward providing more bland, pre-packaged software for the masses that doesn't cost as much to support - but which also doesn't provide all the power of its predecessors.  I don't know if lowering support cost is Adobe's main motivation here, or maybe they just want to gather up their GPU development stuff for their own use, but the elimination of the Pixel Bender capability just seems wrong for a product that is at the cutting edge of graphics technology.  I feel sorry for the companies that grew up around building Pixel Bender plug-ins/applets.

-Noel

I'm quite angry about this change, too, as I have invested quite a bit of time in writing PB shaders for my personal use, fully expecting to use them a few versions forward. There is no upgrade path or alternative solution aside from MATLAB, a GIMP/Gluas combination or writing an actual Plug-In (which means a lot more work and dealing with ancient 68K relics like PiPL resources and stuff like that, and how many people really know enough C++?). Plus, PB was great for prototyping stuff and testing ideas where a fully fledged plug-in just wasn't feasible, or where a specific problem could be more easily fixed in code than with Photoshop's built-in tools. I'd write a quick PB shader if I had a very complex edge fringing problem Photoshop's tools couldn't fix without excessive manual work, but I certainly wouldn't write and debug a plug-in in such a situation.

Any word on whether PB will at least continue to be supported inside After Effects?