When I’m editing the slit scan pictures, I often res down a 60,000 x 6000 pixel image to a 6000 x 6000 one, compressing the time axis. I’ve not found an appropriate resolution changing tool, nor have I found a good Photoshop filter to do the averaging of 10 or so pixels in only one direction to apply before using a conventional resolution changing operation.
I decided that what I’d like to do is find a Photoshop filter that allowed the user to specify the kernel. I did a web search. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I found something that looked a lot better. It’s an Adobe tool called Pixel Bender that allows the user to write short C programs that operate on Photoshop images. There are two pieces: the Pixel Bender program itself, which is a specialized C development environment, and plug-ins for various Adobe applications, among them Photoshop CS4 and CS5.
This sounded great. I went to the Adobe site, and looked for the Photoshop CS6 plug-in. I didn’t find it. After little poking around, I found an Adobe forum where people were complaining that Adobe had decided not to support Pixel Bender on any of the CS6 applications.
Now I’m having second thoughts about taking the time to learn the Pixel Bender development environment and writing filters in it. I have Photoshop CS5.1, so I can use Pixel Bender filters for the time being, but it sounds like these filters will be orphans in the future, as operating systems evolve to the point where you can’t run CS5 applications on them.
Does anybody know of another way for me to do the image preprocessing that I want to do?
[…] May, as I reported in this post http://blog.kasson.com/?p=1723 , I started looking into ways to implement nonstandard image processing algorithms in Photoshop. I […]