Pixel Bender Gallery Plugin is now available for Adobe Photoshop CS4. This plugin is actually more of a framework to allow Pixel Blender plugins to be used, these can be all kinds of different effects from sharpening, to blurring, to warping, and much more. What is really interesting about the Pixel Blender plugin is that it runs on your systems GPU (graphics card) and is wicked fast. Try turning off the GPU support and watch your machine come to a crawl! Here are some key features:

• It runs filters really, really fast on your graphics card (GPU)
• The plug-in is not one filter, but rather a harness into which you can drop Pixel Bender files (.PBK and .PBG)
• Pixel Bender also runs cross-platform in After Effects CS4 & Flash Player 10
• The filters people write for Flash will also work in Photoshop
• We should therefore see an explosion in the number of new Photoshop filters becoming available

The above image used the zoomblur plugin to achieve the final image. More information on this is available at John Nack’s Blog. To get Pixel Blender, visit Adobe Labs.

Adobe Configurator 1.0

Configurator is a simple drag-and-drop tool for creating panels that extend Photoshop CS4.  It’s an important step in the process of making the Photoshop UI much more flexible–much better able to be “everything you need, nothing you don’t.”  John Nack has a lot more information about this on his blog.