Free Adobe plugin - Pixel Bender...

Pixel Bender is a free plug-in for Photoshop CS5 that will give you a "painting" effect and a whole lot more.

Though it is from Adobe and free, it does not come as part if the Photoshop installation, you will need to head over to Adobe and download it here. You can check out (and download) Pixel Bender filters that have been designed by others at the Pixel Bender Exchange.

And if you're feeling real ambitious you can also download the Pixel Bender toolkit and develop some filters of your own.

In this episode of Photoshop User TV Dave Cross gives us a look at the capabilities of Pixel Bender.

My My friend Mike Palmer recently did a couple posts about Pixel Bender (here and here), below is one of the images he posted.

The details: "Shot using a D300 with a 24-120vr Nikkor... a 5 shot HDR merged and tonemapped in Photomatix Pro, to Lightroom 3 for small develop tweaks, then to CS5 to use Pixel Bender".

(click on image to view larger in a new window)

2 comments:

Damien Franco said...

That's actually kinda cool.

I've never really liked many "painterly" effects I've seen from any automatic actions or plugins.

This one looks good. It would probably look great as a canvas print. You know...for full effect!

Pamela Harayda Smith | The Welkin Studio said...

This looks interesting and certainly worth checking out for the price tag.

Scott, have you any experience with the artsy/painterly plugin called "Buzz?" Was used and raved about in an online class I took a few years ago. If you are familiar with this plugin, I wonder: how you think Pixel Bender compares?

For what I can tell, they both seem to be designed to do the same thing. Does one have more superior results? Is one easier to use? Anything else of note?

Thanks!!