Pixel Bender
When Photoshop CS5 was launched it came with a whole raft of improvements and new features, but one area that was identical to Photoshop CS4 was its filters.
But Adobe hasn’t dropped the ball when it comes to filters, in fact they’ve been working hard in the background to develop a whole new generation of filters. Best of all you can download them right now for free.
Pixel Bender is a Photoshop plugin which uses the speed and power of your graphics card or GPU as it’s known.
You can download Pixel Bender from Adobe Labs, just make sure you get the right one for your copy of Photoshop (CS4, CS5, CS5.5)
To make life easier I’ve made a three minute video that shows you how it’s done.
Once installed go and checkout the amazing Oil Paint filter as used in my video below.
Do you know if there is a Pixel Blender filter for PSE?
Pixel Bender is a Photoshop CS4 & CS5 thing… sorry.
I have the pixel bender filters for CS5, and there is a bug in that every time I type in numbers in the size area (does not matter which filter I use) as opposed to using the slider, photoshop crashes … I was led to believe that this is a bug that I simply must live with, however I noticed that in your video you enter numbers and have no crash problem. Has there been some upgrade or fix that can be downloaded? Thanks.
Plaese help us with mac Lion! It is impossible to do this, it keeps showing an error: You don’t have the appropiate permissions required to perform this operation. contact the administrator.
But I am the administrator! It never ask for any password or something! Help!
Plaese help us with mac Lion! It is impossible to do this, it keeps showing an error: You don’t have the appropiate permissions required to perform this operation. contact the administrator.
But I am the administrator! It never ask for any password or something!
Pixel bender is a fabulous tool. I tried it on a lion portrait and made a print on canvas. The art teacher at our school thought it was a painting.
I managed to install this but it would not work at first.
My version of CS5 which was delivered by post rather than downloaded was version 12.0 and the installer originally halted with a message saying that 12.1 was required. I had to download CS5 from Adobe, install and enter my serial number and then Pixel Bender finally installed correctly.
Man I’ve tried everything to get this to work and for some reason I get no where. Everytime I launch the Pixel Bender Gallery it crashes. I’ve tried it on 12.0 and 12.1 both 32 and 64 bit versions. I guess it’s not meant to be.
When I try to istall the program through extention manager it tells me I do not have permission and should consult my administrator, as Its my computer how do I sort this out.
Great video’s by the way keep up the good work.
Bill
You have to launch the Extension Manager as an Administrator. On a PC the means Right clicking lauch Extension Manager and selecting the administrator option.
Is Pixel Bender available for CS4
There is a version of Pixel Bender for CS4, but it can’t use many of the filters CS5 can use.
Hi Gavin, Just curious with this pixel bender. An idea came to me after watching this, two things: once the photo is done do you save it as a normal jpeg and then could i use it in proshow producer as a Background, if so what format would it have to be in and do i change it to that format. thanks
Hi Gavin, thanks for the tutorial. I have PS CS4 running Windows 7 64 bit. I installed the Pixel Bender plug and it now appears under filters in PS. But when I try to go to the gallery I get an error message. Do you happen to know how I can fix this?
Thanks, Jim
Hi Gavin
Do you know if there will be a version for cs6?
Thanks
I have a feeling that the Pixel Bender project is on hold, so I don’t think you’ll see it in Photoshop CS6.
Thanks Gavin for reply shame they probably won’t release one for cs6
Dear Gavin,
i’ve followed ur video tutorial to download the “pixel bender exchange”, and than i have installed it using “adobe extension manager”… but i can’t find the file folder anywhere in “program files, adobe, adobe photoshop cs5, …” or under any plugs-in files, in order to add “droste effect”…
but i get to see it (pixel bender) grayed within the filters in the tool bar of adobe photoshop when it’s open.
thank u
laura
Hello I have had no p[roblem loading the pixel bender and then downloading droste effect when I follow your directions but pixel bender filter all work but when I click droste effect it crashes photoshop any ideas I have students dying to use this but for the life of me cannot figure out what is wrong. Does droste need to be down loaded with extension manger? I also noticed Droste is a rather large file 15k verses the other filters in pixel bender are 3 to 5 k
I am having the same problem. I installed the pixel bender on photoshop cs 5.5. The other filters work. When I choose droste, photoshop crashes and tells me I have to restart. Did you ever figure out a solution to this? If so, I would love to know.
Thanks.
Is pixel bender still available?
Sadly it’s long gone 🙁