Running Photoshop filters on the GPU

[Captain Chickenpants]

You could do it yourself!
The Adobe Photoshop plugin SDK is freely available, if a little large. It covers import and export filters as well as effect filters.
Bear in mind that Adobe want to keep it's product as cross platform as possible. The sample plugin they ship will compile on a MAC just as easily as on the PC (I never tried the MAC), if they start adding hardware specific support then they will lose that platform indedpendance.

CC

 

[JF_Aidan_Pryde]

Now that's interesting. It doesn't mean you can't do vendor specific ones for personal use / free distribution right?

And how would the code access the GPU? I mean there has to be a compiler for the GPU right? Or libaries you have to include? Are those available yet?

 

[Captain Chickenpants]

I don't think that they would object to free distribution, best read their EULA though.

I think you would need to treat the plugin as a 3D app. You would get the large painful operation of copying the data between the photoshop surface and your render surface and back again ,even more painful as you can have completly arbitrary shapes, and even use data outside the selection. But you would compile your shaders in the same way you would for any other program.

CC

 

[Humus]

I thought ATI already had specific MPEG decoding features on their chips (the DVD-playback stuff). Wouldn't it be kind of pointless to step back and use shaders? Maybe in a few generations they can support that stuff only in shaders, and I agree it makes sense for DivX and other stuff that's not supported, but at the moment using shaders for MPEG decoding would be dumb.

More general ways take over the fixed function stuff. Like pixel shader replaces the texture combining pipeline, vertex shader replace fixed function T&L ... fixed function video decoding and possibly encoding too will be replace by more general hardware.

When it comes to mpeg decoding, it doesn't matter if it's slower as long as it's fast enough. If the movie is encoded in 30fps you don't need to be able to decode it faster than that.

 

[NocturnDragon]

You could do it yourself!
The Adobe Photoshop plugin SDK is freely available, if a little large. It covers import and export filters as well as effect filters.

The sdk is no more free! it's free if you pay the 195$ membership!