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Great Blue Heron and Pixel Bender

Great Blue Heron; copyright © reserved 2006-2011, Richard Lovison

After recently purchasing the CS5 upgrade I became aware of the Adobe filter Pixel Bender. Since I’ve been experimenting with post processing effects I thought I’d give this freely available one a try. The only option I’ve found useful so far is the OilPaint effect that is used in the image above.

My Pentium 4 workstation is definitely dated utilizing only a single core 3GHZ CPU, 3GB of ram and a 512MB ATI X1650 video card. CS5 runs much better than CS2 ever did though the Pixel Bender filter runs horribly. Pixel Bender utilizes the GPU on the video card instead of the computer CPU though with my setup which meets Adobe requirements, moving the option sliders is ridiculously slow and clunky and I’m limited to an image size of around 1500 pixels square otherwise my preview window goes to all black. Unless I can find the reason and solution for the performance hit, the filter will probably rarely be used in the future.

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    This entry was posted on Sunday, February 20th, 2011 at 2:33 pm and is filed under Photography, Photography Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

    3 Responses to “Great Blue Heron and Pixel Bender”

    1. Marcie says:
      February 20, 2011 at 3:53 pm

      The capture itself – the heron perched on this tree – is beautiful enough. The oil painting effect makes it surreal!

    2. Rosie@leavesnbloom says:
      March 23, 2011 at 4:15 am

      I see I’ve meet someone else now who loves that oil painting effect. I normally just use the pixel bender on my flower images but maybe I should try it with my wildlife images aswell.

      (I’m on the NBN team and I was popping over to see your blog – I’ll be welcoming your blog to the network in the next few weeks)

    3. Richard Lovison says:
      March 23, 2011 at 7:42 am

      Rosie,

      Thanks for taking the time to look at my blog. :)

      So far the oil effect is the only one I like. I’ve upgraded my video card and now the software works better.

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