A new and unique ASCII video streaming solution has been released under the MIT license. ASCILINE Engine by YusufB5 is pitched as a “high-performance, real-time ASCII video rendering engine” that can be used to broadcast “an unblockable video stream.” Examples of its capabilities are provided in the linked GitHub repository and social media posts by the dev, like the one embedded below. It's also stoked a bit of controversy due to fears of it potentially enabling unblockable ads.

I built an unblockable video stream. It renders 360p at 30 FPS using pure text instead of tags. from r/SideProject

From our perusal of the examples, ASCILINE does indeed look like it is capable of better fidelity than prior video to ASCII streamers, some of which have a surprisingly long history dating back to the 90s. The software does a pretty decent job of making color text-based videos from a source. The dev notes that this technique uses Mode 3, using a palette of 32K colors, and can output at 30 FPS. Though classic mono ASCII is also a render option.

Most impressive is the so-called real-time pixel streaming. The GitHub explains that this technique uses Mode 5 and “replaces characters with colored blocks, approaching 360p video quality.” Indeed, in the small embedded video on the page, it looks indistinguishable from the source MP4. We think the innate blockiness would become apparent quickly if it were rendered in a larger window, though.

In a mission statement of sorts, YusufB5 says that ASCILINE’s “core objective is to transform the web into a highly dynamic and interactive typographic canvas. By mapping pixels to text-based representations, we unlock new possibilities for web media delivery.” On social media, the dev simplifies this highfalutin vision by heralding ASCILINE Engine as a tool that can build “an unblockable video stream. It renders 360p at 30 FPS using pure text.”

The ‘unblockable’ claim gets plenty of pushback across various social media channels. For example, an adblocker put in element zapper mode can quickly remove the HTML5 Canvas that the ASCII video renders in. That’s just one option.

However, most commenters are fearful of those wanting to serve more ads to the public using this ‘unblockable’ tech. YusufB5 points to their “strict anti-ad clause to the MIT License to ensure this isn't abused to force unskippable ads on people.” That might work with registered companies, but malicious users won’t care about such a rule.

Beyond the unblockability and ad misuse controversies, ASCILINE has some more interesting frills and features to set it apart from the old guard of ASCII video. The ability to apply real-time CSS filters to the video stream sounds like it may be appealing in some instances. Also, the ASCII video generated is thought to “act as a perfect bridge for AI.” Thus, you can use lightweight LLMs to process semantic video summaries. The engine’s “ultra-low bandwidth & IoT compatibility” may also be attractive to some, with its ability to stream at only a few kilobytes per frame. Sending only the characters that change (delta frames) and applying GZIP compression both help in this regard.

If you would like to rehome thousands of old VHS videotapes, there’s an incredible hoard of these nostalgic artifacts from the days of analog TV, stored carefully in McDonald's boxes, being given away for free. However, you’ll need a convincing story, as it already looks like a representative from the Internet Archive is a hot favorite to claim this truckload of tapes and digitize them. Redditor whatdoyouthinkisreal shared images of this gargantuan collection of tapes a few days ago.

Free: Thousands of tapes preserved. 2004~2009 CNN/MSNBC/FOX News recorded at home in Ann Arbor area from r/DataHoarder

The OP notes that the collection of tapes has already shrunk by around 18 boxes.

The general goal of whatdoyouthinkisreal’s giveaway is to “give them to someone who is going to save and digitize the tapes.” Bonus – the donor will get a lot of garage space back.

So, what TV and cinematic gems should the new owner expect to find in this massive collection, recorded at an Ann Arbor area home between 2004 and 2009? Apparently, it is wall-to-wall news coverage from that era, featuring channels like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.

That content might be of some interest to someone, we guess. The Redditor suggests that “I think the commercials might be even more valuable than the news, but there is Hurricane Katrina Coverage here too.”

Other notable round-the-clock news coverage events during that time may have included:

• Janet Jackson had a ‘wardrobe malfunction’ at the Super Bowl in 2004
• Two presidential elections, 2004 (Dubya won) and 2008 (Obama won)
• The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami
• The 2005 London bombings (7/7)
• Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston divorced in 2005
• The Execution of Saddam Hussein in 2006
• Release of the first iPhone in 2007
• 'Keeping Up with the Kardashians' premiered in 2007
• 2007 U.S. troop 'surge' in Iraq
• The 2008 Beijing Olympics
• The 2008 Financial crisis
• Russia–Georgia war in 2008 (they're still at it)
• Michael Jackson died, and Lady Gaga rose to fame in 2009
• The 2009 Colorado Balloon Boy hoax earned 24/7 coverage

In case anyone finds the McDonald's franchise cardboard carton packaging questionable, the OP explains, “They're in McDonald's food boxes because the woman who recorded these worked at McDonald's at one time.”

As we mentioned in the intro, any potential suitor for this titanic collection better have a good story. One of the first Redditors to throw their hat in the ring and claim this incredible prize was Jason Scott of the Internet Archive. Many other Redditors upvoted this suggestion, understandably. However, there were a few grumbles about the IA currently sitting on tons and tons of content without getting around to digitizing it and sharing it online.

Adobe Photoshop has been around for many, many years and it has been the de facto standard used in the creative industries. Heck, when I was in college I learnt how to use Adobe Photoshop 1.0 and made my own magazine with Photoshop and Aldus Pagemaker. The problem with Photoshop has always been cost.

I have long spouted the idiom “the right tool for the job” to anyone who would listen to me, but I had to make a concession. Photoshop was just too expensive for me as a college student, and I didn’t need it enough to drop hundreds of dollars on a copy.

So I migrated to other alternatives. JASC Paint Shop Pro (before Corel) and Corel’s products did what I needed, but they didn’t meet all of my needs. I had to wait until GIMP arrived for something close to Photoshop.

Fast forward to today, and we have a myriad of Photoshop alternatives to choose from. Many are now cloud based, and either rely on advertisements or a subscription (just like Adobe Photoshop!)

I’ll admit, Adobe Photoshop is a powerful beast. It has effects, plugins and new AI features that make content creation and photography much easier. The free alternatives cannot compete with those features, but they do provide enough features for most users to get the job done.

Which Photoshop alternative is the best for you? I’ve tested five alternatives, some well known and a couple of curveballs that took me by surprise.

I tested the following alternatives.

1. GIMP
2. Krita
3. Pinta
4. PhotoDemon
5. Paint.NET

The goal was to test my image editing workflow in each editor. Which editors can be used with Photoshop’s native PSD file format, and can any handle RAW images from a DSLR? Can the editors work with layers? What effects are there? Can I crop and reframe images? How does it feel in use? Quick, sluggish? Can I move around the image, zoom in or select areas? Is the UI an approximation of Photoshop or does it have its own style? Let's find out!

1. GIMP

1. GIMP

The standard for free image editors

👍 Reasons to use

• Free
• Compatible with RAW and PSD files, along with many other formats
• Plugins extend the functionality

👎 Reasons to avoid

• User interface is daunting for newcomers
• A little slower than Photoshop

Open source image editing software and GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is at the top of many lists. The cross-platform editor is often seen as one of the posterchilds for open source software and it is typically pre-installed on a plethora of Linux distros.

I’ve used GIMP for well over 15 years and on a diverse range of machines (an original Asus eeePC being one) and it remains one of the most used applications in my workflow. I can do it all with GIMP, crop and reframe an image, add layers to alter the image / add elements. It just works, but it does take a little extra effort.

GIMP looks and feels like a Photoshop alternative. The interface is yours to customize; you can even make it look more like Photoshop. Sure it will take a little while to get used to, and that requires effort but once you do, you’ll be tweaking photos and creating content with ease, and without paying Adobe big bucks for the privilege.

Taking things further, GIMP has a plugin ecosystem that can automate many tasks. Batch processing or image manipulation: all can be achieved using a plugin written in languages like Python or C/C++. You can even call GIMP from the command line / terminal to batch edit images without pressing a button.

GIMP is what I have been using for a long time. It does feel a little “clunky” and slow when compared to Photoshop, but for zero cost, we get an extremely capable image editor that has plenty of power and features for most of us. Professional Photoshop users may find it difficult to transition over to GIMP, but it has all that you need.

2. Krita

2. Krita

For artists and photographers

👍 Reasons to use

• Excellent illustration tools
• Magnetic selection tool is awesome
• Plethora of tools on offer
• PSD and RAW support

👎 Reasons to avoid

• Slow to startup
• User interface is daunting for newcomers

This is more of an artist's tool for illustration than image editing, but don’t let that fool you as Krita has a similar depth of features to GIMP. Krita is geared to digital art, and it has been used in game development and illustration for many years.

The Krita user interface is just as daunting as GIMP. If you are proficient in Photoshop / GIMP then your muscle memory will need retraining for Krita. I got confused when trying to zoom into a section.

In GIMP we would use CTRL+ scrollwheel but this didn’t work in Krita. Instead I had to just use the scroll wheel. Moving around a zoomed area is achieved by pressing the spacebar and then holding left click, move around the image. Again, muscle memory kept tripping me up.

Krita’s overall speed is beautiful. I was able to move around, zoom and select brushes, filters and tweak layers as if I were gliding. The only friction I ever encountered was the aforementioned muscle memory. But, I am sure after using Krita for a while, that will melt away.

Krita has full support for opening and saving Photoshop PSD files. If you are working with RAW files, then you can open them, but you will obviously need to save the output as another filetype.

Krita’s strength is in drawing and illustration, but it can be used to tweak photos. There are filters and layers which can be used to alter images, but there are no exact tools for photo manipulation. There are filters for tweaking your images, much less than GIMP, but the core is there. Also, I loved the magnetic selection tool. It did a pretty decent job of selecting points around an object that I wanted to cut out. It wasn’t perfect, but I was able to tweak the points for a more precise selection.

Just like GIMP, Krita has plugins which can provide additional features such as finer control of brushes and automating processes like batch export of images. This means that we can tweak Krita to suit our workflow.

Artists and illustrators will love Krita’s tablet support. If you’ve got the kit, or have the money, then you can easily use Krita with a graphics tablet and get the best from its illustration and photo manipulation features.

Krita is great, but it leans more on illustration than photo manipulation, which isn’t a fault; that is its intended use case after all. It can do the job of Photoshop, but its strengths lie in illustration.

3. Pinta

3. Pinta

A jack of all trades editor

👍 Reasons to use

• Simple to use
• Lightweight
• Quick

👎 Reasons to avoid

• No RAW or PSD support
• Perhaps a little too simple for professional users

Feeling like a “beefed up “ MSPaint, Pinta offers features often found in more “powerful” image editors. The simple and clean interface is very “Microsoft” despite it having nothing to do with it. Pinta can be used to edit images, and has a basic suite of photo tools. It can also be used to illustrate and annotate images.

The user interface is simple, eschewing a myriad of buttons and tools in favor of providing just the essentials. There are no magnetic selection tools, not even a crop. Instead we have the standard rectangle, circle and lasso selectors. They get the job done, but I miss the crop tool.

We’ve got layers on which we can place content and / or manipulate the image. We also have an extensive history, accessible via the right hand side menu. Here we can see the actions taken on an image, and reverse them should an issue occur. This is quite a powerful tool for such a simple application.

There are add-ins, Pinta’s parlance for plugins, and installation is performed externally. There are add-ins for image uploading, night vision effects and dither effects. But there aren’t many add-ins so the choice is quite limited.

Pinta is a jack of all trades application. It does a lot of things well, but this isn’t a specialist application. It can’t open PSD or RAW files, so if you rely on those file formats, look elsewhere. But, if you need a simple editor that has most of the tools in an easy to use package, then Pinta is a great choice.

4. PhotoDemon

4. PhotoDemon

Good all-round Photoshop alternative

👍 Reasons to use

• Small application
• Lots of Photoshop features
• Open Photoshop, RAW and GIMP files
• Plethora of filters

👎 Reasons to avoid

• Muscle memory will be tested

This was the wildcard of the bunch. I’d never heard of PhotoDemon, but it turned out to be a solid performer. The application weighs in at under 10MB! But, in that small package, we get a lot of functionality. PhotoDemon can open and save PSD files, and it can open RAW image files. So photographers can tweak their images with relative ease. A nice feature is that PhotoDemon can also open GIMP XCF files, useful if you want to add PhotoDemon to your processing workflow.

PhotoDemon feels like a mash-up of Photoshop and GIMP and the user interface is clear and easy to use. The “Photo” part of its name indicates that it works more for photography than illustration. One issue I faced was the location of the color wheel.

I’m used to GIMP’s location on the left side, PhotoDemon has it in the top right corner. My muscle memory had a workout while testing PhotoDemon.

PhotoDemon has a plethora of filters under the Effects menu. Seriously there are a lot of effects that can be applied to your work. The usual suspects are there, blur, pixelate, render clouds. Also there are artistic styles and natural effects that make images look like they are underwater.

PhotoDemon has a selection of third-party libraries which offer extra functionality. They are managed in-app using a package manager of sorts. This is a nice touch and makes handling libraries really easy, I just wish there were more libraries!

If you need layers, you’ve got them! Layers work just like GIMP / Photoshop and enable images to be composed of multiple layers, like a portrait photo on a fancy background. Working with layers is easy, and the user interface is clean and easy to understand.

Could I use PhotoDemon on a day to day basis? Yes, but my one tripping point was an often overlooked feature. For annotating tutorials, I use Stroke Selection to put a colored border around an area that I wish to highlight. PhotoDemon has this feature, under Edit >> Stroke, but the dialog box used to configure it is a little clumsy for me. I just want to create a highlight using the selected color.

PhotoDemon is a good editor, once you learn its quirks. The tiny file size means that it loads in seconds, and it runs beautifully on my test system. All for zero cost!

5. Paint.net

5. Paint.net

Simple and great for annotations

👍 Reasons to use

• Simple to use
• Lots of effects
• Annotation tools are great
• Performs slick

👎 Reasons to avoid

• No Photoshop / RAW compatibility
• Layer properties takes an extra step

Don’t judge a book by its cover also applies to websites. The Paint.net site is a cacophony of adverts and “download” buttons that instantly put me off. But I persevered and I was pleasantly surprised.

The general look and feel of Paint.net is that of MS Paint but with Photoshop levels of tools and widgets. I got really “Paint Shop Pro 7” vibes from the UI (and yes, I used that back in the day too). The UI uses floating palettes that can be “clicked” into the perimeter of the screen, and I really like this. I can move the widgets and set up the interface how I like it.

Well, the Stroke Selection issue that I encountered with PhotoDemon is refreshingly solved by Paint.net. In the Tools palette, I found a shapes option and from there I could draw vector shapes on the image. This works beautifully and I can see this becoming part of my workflow for tutorials.

The color of the shape's perimeter uses the foreground color and by default does not have a fill color. This can be changed so that the shape is filled with color, and there are a multitude of shapes to choose from. Very handy for how to writers who want to point out a specific section in a screenshot.

Sadly there is no compatibility with Photoshop or RAW files, so if you need those features, this isn’t the image editor for you. But you do get a plethora of other file formats at your disposal.

Using filers / effects is a joy. I marvelled at the realtime response when previewing an effect, it felt right that I should see exactly how it would apply without a long pause as the PC does the math.

The app does not support installation of plugins directly, but you can install plugins externally.

Layers work just like the other editors tested, but accessing the layer properties (for the blend mode) is a two step process, unlike GIMP which has the layer properties front and center.

I really enjoyed Paint.net and for most of my workflow it is perfect. If I need to work with RAW, PSD or XCF files then I am out of luck, but I mostly work in PNG, JPG, GIF and WebP. If you just need a simple, yet feature packed editor then Paint.net is for you.

Layers are a clever and easy-to-use way to introduce elements to an image without destroying the source or main image. It works similarly to placing sheets of paper on top of each other. Each piece is a separate element of the composition, but when put together, they become the image you want the world to see.

In this how-to we will use GIMP’s layers to take a stock image, remove the subject from the image, and apply effects just to the subject, leaving the background untouched. We’ll learn how to create new layers, manage layers, and apply effects to certain parts of an image using alpha selection.

All you’ll need for this how-to is a copy of the free GIMP image editor, and this stock image of a car. Use this as a basis for experimenting with the image and the tools on hand.

Working with layers

At the bottom right of the GIMP interface, we find the layers tab. By default there is just one layer, our background. Many users will just paint / work directly to this layer, but if we need additional layers we need to do the following.

Creating a new layer

1. Click on the + icon at the bottom of the interface.

2. Give the layer a name, fill the layer with transparency, and click OK to create. Give your layers meaningful names, once you are using multiple layers it can quickly become confusing.

3. Ensure that the new layer is active. By default, GIMP will select the new layer as the active layer and any work will be done on that layer. Clicking on a layer will switch to that layer.

Another way to create a new layer is to import an image as a new layer.

1. Click on File >> Open as Layers.

2. Select your file and click open. This will open the image a new layer, on top of the currently selected layer. The image can be manipulated on the layer, so we can resize / edit the image to match the other layers.

Using layers in a composition

Our goal here is to take a stock image from pexels.com, remove the subject from the background and then create a new layer to superimpose the subject over itself. There we will create a border effect to make the subject stand out.

Removing the subject from the image can be done via a number of online services such as remove.bg, or you can use Python to remove the background.

We’ve chosen a stock car image and run the image through remove.bg to cut the car from the background. Now we have two images. The original image, and just the car.

1. Open GIMP and click on File >> Open as Layers.

2. Open the original image and it will be set as the active layer.

3. Repeat the File >> Open as Layers process and open the cut-out image of the car. The cut-out image will be loaded on top of the original image, and because they are the same subject, we cannot see a big difference.

4. Click on the eye icon next to each layer to set its visibility. Click on the bottom layer to remove the background, leaving just the subject on the top layer. Set both layers as visible before moving on to the next step.

5. Double click on the layer name and edit to reflect what that layer refers to. It is important to name layers so that we can quickly understand the many layers that make the composition.

6. Select the subject layer, and right click on the subject layer (the top layer in this example) and select Alpha to Selection. This will automatically select the subject as it is the only thing on that layer.

7. From the main menu click Select >> Border.

8. Set the border to 10 pixels around the subject, and click OK. The subject now has a 10px border around its perimeter.

9. Create a new layer and call it “border”. Click OK to activate. The active layer will now shift to “border”, and it is on top of all other layers.

10. Move the “border” layer so that it is between the subject and the background.

11. Click on the Bucket icon, and hold the button down. Select the Gradient tool from the drop down.

12. Select the saturation fill from the menu.

13. Ensuring that the border layer is selected, click and drag across the image to create a colorful gradient border around the subject. Press Enter to set the gradient. The start and end points can be tweaked to change the color effect.

14, Select the subject layer and click on the Mode drop down just above the layers. Here we can alter the properties of a layer so that the contents of the layer can be used for artistic effects.

15. Try out a few different modes to see what suits your vision of the composition. For this step there is no right or wrong, it is an artistic choice. Multiply makes the image darker, Screen bright, and exclusion produces a negative image.

16. With the subject layer still selected, click on Filters >> Artistic >> Cartoon (Legacy). Each layer can have its own filters / effects.

17. Set the mask radius to 30.5 and the percent black to 0.8 and click on Ok to apply. This will transform just the subject (car) into a cartoon image against a real background.

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For now we are done. We’ve taken a stock image, added some layers, effects and played with how the composition works. To take it further, explore how the different layer modes and effects work with each other to create different styles. As Bob Ross would say, ““There are no mistakes, just happy accidents.”

More GIMP Tutorials

• How To Remove Image Backgrounds Using GIMP
• How To Resize Images in GIMP
• How To Make GIMP Look and Feel Like Photoshop

HandBrake, the popular free and open source video transcoder, has been updated to version 1.6.0. This major point upgrade is notable for facilitating AV1 video encoding for the first time in a general release. Moreover, those with Intel Quick Sync Video (QSV) enabled processors, and those with Intel Arc GPUs will be able to encode AV1 video with hardware acceleration.

HandBrake 1.6.0 can encode AV1 videos on any of its supported systems. In the current release its SVT-AV1 encoder offers the widest support, encoding on your processor through software. However, those with Intel QSV supporting CPUs or discrete Arc graphics can use the QSV-AV1 encoder for hardware accelerated processing. QSV isn't supported if your CPU is an ‘F’ suffixed model (i.e. it doesn't have an iGPU), or it is older than the Skylake generation. If you are lucky enough to have multiple QSV accelerators in your system, support for Intel Deep Link Hyper Encode should accelerate processing further. While AMD and Nvidia have AV1 encoders available for their latest GPUs, they currently aren’t integrated with HandBrake.

AV1 video is set to become the dominant codec across app-based streaming services and the wider internet, offering attractions such as; an open and royalty-free architecture, improved compression enabling efficient 8K video streaming, and support for the newest HDR standards. Developed by the Alliance for Open Media, the AV1 standard is expected to usurp the likes of H.264/AVC and HEVC, and it looks like a sure-fire winner with the support of tech giants like Amazon, Apple, ARM, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, and Samsung.

Alongside the new AV1 transcoding support, the HandBrake developers have put together several 10-bit encoder profiles, and a handful of presets for dealing with typical AV1 encoding tasks. For those still interested in H.264 and H.265 encoding there are new profiles too. Meanwhile, a multitude of the app’s built in filters are updated in v1.6.0, with many of the updates implemented to support >8-bit color depths. The latest release notes on GitHub details all the above changes, as well as the updated libraries, and tweaks such as bug fixes on various platforms.

If you are interested in grabbing the latest HandBrake release to dabble in AV1 encoding, earlier versions of the transcoding utility are currently not seeing the update as available. Instead of waiting, you can head on over to the official downloads page and download and install or upgrade your existing version. HandBrake is available for Windows 10 or later, MacOS, and Linux.

The GNU Image Manipulation Program or “GIMP” is an amazing piece of free and open source software created and maintained by a dedicated group of volunteer developers. It’s an incredibly fully featured image editor with powerful tools to make the best of your graphics and photographs. Don’t be daunted by its complexity; sometimes it’s just a really useful tool for simpler tasks. We’ve published other tutorials on how to resize images in GIMP and how to make GIMP look more like Photoshop, but what if you just want to remove the background from an image in GIMP:

There are numerous reasons you might want to remove a background from an image but it can be a challenging process. There are however numerous excellent tools and approaches to completing this task and in this how-to we shall explore how to use them in GIMP.

Preparing the Image in GIMP

1. Launch GIMP and use “File – Open” to select the image you wish to remove the background from. We’ve used this picture of a wool craft project snowman as it has some trickier aspects, such as a very wooly and fuzzy outline which will allow us to show a variety of approaches.

2. Add an “alpha channel” to the active layer by left clicking on the active layer, then right click and select “Add Alpha Channel”.

We are now ready to start to use various tools to remove the background. It’s worth noting though that the tools we are about to explore are all types of selection tools, although for this task we are always deleting what we select, these selection methods can be used with other tools; moving, scaling, the bucket fill tool and many more.

Using Fuzzy Select in GIMP

1. Select the Fuzzy Select tool, it looks like a wand and left click anywhere in a background area of the picture. The Fuzzy Select tool will now select an area of background that matches the color of the area where you clicked. In our case it selects a continuous area of the wood grain in the background of the image that is all the same color. An image with a consistent background, such as an object against a clear blue sky would select the entire background in one go.

2. Press the delete key to remove that area. Repeatedly selecting areas with the Fuzzy Select tool we can remove a lot of the background area of our image but it would require a lot of repetition to fully complete the task. If you ever need to cancel all the selected areas on an image a good keyboard shortcut is to press “control + shift + A”, this works for any selection area created by any of the selection tools.

Using the Rectangle or Ellipse Select Tool in GIMP

There are large parts of our image background that we could select using the rectangle selection tool. This tool is fairly intuitive to use and can save time by simply removing lots of the background in blocks. This tool can also be switched into an ellipse tool to create elliptical or circular selections.

1. Right click the Select Tool icon and select which shape tool you require. You can also select either of these tools under the “Tools – Selection tools” menu.

2. Click and drag in the background area of the image to create a shaped selection.

3. Press the delete key to remove that part of the background.

Using the Free Select Tool in GIMP

For more complex shaped area selection we can use the Free Select tool. The free select tool allows you to draw connected straight lines to create custom shaped selection areas.

1. Click on the icon, it resembles a lasso.

2. Left click to start a line, move to a new spot and left click again to add a new line segment. To complete the selection you must join the final line to the very first node point where you started. Hovering over the starting node it will turn yellow and then you left click to create a selection area within the lines you created.

3. Use the delete key to remove the selection.

Using the Paths Tool in GIMP

The Paths Tool is not just a selection type tool, it is a tool that allows the creation of complex selections (Bézier Curves) that we can edit and paint with. However it can also be used as a selection tool in a similar way to the free select tool but with the added advantage of straight and curved lines. This gives you both control and accuracy when tracing around a complex object.

1. Select the Paths Tool from the tool icon area or you can find it at “Tools – Paths”.

2. Left click to start a path and then add more lines by moving and left clicking.

3. Hover over a line section, left click and drag the line to create a curve and control handles.

4. To close a path, hover over the first path node, hold down the control key and left click.

5. To turn your enclosed path into a selection, click Select >> From Path. You should now see that your path outline becomes a selection and you can delete this section of background with the delete key.

Using the Foreground Select Tool in GIMP

There is another way to remove an object from an image using the Foreground Select tool. Using this tool we can specify what is the foreground and what is the background by setting a boundary and a mask.

1. Click on the Foreground Select tool.

2. Draw a crude outline around the object and press Enter. This specifies what is the foreground (light blue) and what is now set as the background (dark blue).

3. Inside the foreground area, use the already selected brush to loosely define what the foreground image will be. Don’t get too close to the boundary, and change the size of the brush by pressing [ (smaller_, or ] (larger).

4. Click on Preview to review the mask. When happy click on Select.

5. The foreground can now be cut from the image using CTRL + X or Edit >> Cut.

With this collection of tools at your disposal, you now have a varied number of approaches to remove backgrounds, with the added bonus that you have learnt how to use multiple styles of selection tool useful for many other functions in GIMP.

The GNU Image Manipulation Program or “GIMP” is an amazing piece of free and open source software created and maintained by a dedicated group of volunteer developers. It’s an incredibly fully featured image editor with powerful tools to make the best of your graphics and photographs. Don’t be daunted by its complexity; sometimes it’s just a really useful tool for simpler tasks.

There are numerous reasons you might want to resize an image. You may need a very specific size to print, you may need to reduce the size to reduce the filesize or you may be using multiple images in a design and need to size different parts of your composition. In this article we will look at numerous tools GIMP uses to resize images.

How to Resize an Image with Scale Image in GIMP

The easiest way to resize an image in GIMP is to use the Scale Image feature. Using Scale Image we can precisely set the image size in a number of units (percentage, pixels, mm, inches etc) and set the image resolution, essential for images set to be rendered on screen or print.

GIMP’s Scale Image feature resizes everything in the image canvas regardless of layers, so if you have a background image layer and multiple logos on layers above the background all these layers will be scaled accordingly. It’s useful therefore if you have worked on a larger design image and then need to scale it to a specific size for a web application or other size critical use.

1. Click on Image >> Scale Image.

2. Change the size of the image by setting the width and height. The “chain icon” can link the two dimensions together, so changing one will alter the other, based on the image's aspect ratio. These can be unlinked, but the image may become distorted. Image units can be changed using the px dropdown menu.

3. Use X and Y resolution and click Scale to set the image resolution. Typically print resolutions are higher than screen resolutions and are measured in pixels per in (ppi).

How to Resize an Image with the GIMP Scale Tool

The tool palette, located in the top left of the screen is home to many useful tools, some hidden. The scale tool selects the currently active layer, or any area you have selected and scales it in a similar manner to Scale Image.

The scale tool is particularly of use when scaling an image on a separate layer. You can import an image onto a separate layer in GIMP by clicking File >> Open as Layers and selecting the image you want to add. Each layer can be selected using the layers menu (bottom right) and scaled independently of the overall image.

1. Click on the Scale tool, hidden in the top left palette. Hover the mouse over the icons to see all of the tools contained within.

2. Set the desired size and click Scale. Notice that the interface is very similar to the Scale Image. We can scale using the image’s aspect ratio Scaling without stretching or distorting. The measurement units can also be altered using the dropdown menu.

3. Left click and drag on the handles around the image to interactively scale the image. You’ll notice that if you have the lock icon selected in the scale tool dialogue that you maintain the aspect ratio of the image and that the new dimensions of the image are updated in the relevant input boxes.

4. Click Scale in the dialogue box to apply the scale and close the tool.

How to Crop to Content in GIMP

If you have used the scale tool to reduce your image size you’ll notice that the canvas has remained at the original size of the image. This appears as chequered sections of blank canvas visible around your image.

To resize the canvas to the new image size, click on Image and select Crop to Content. This will automatically reduce the canvas to fit your reduced size image.

Fit Canvas to Layers

If you have used the scale tool to increase your image size you’ll notice that the image is partially obscured as it doesn’t fit onto the original canvas. To fix this use File >> Image >> Fit Canvas to Layers. Clicking this option will automatically increase the canvas to fit your larger image.

Resizing the Print Size in GIMP

1. Click on Image >> Print Size to open the dialog.

2. Set the desired print size of the image and click Ok to set. Remember that the units of measurement can be changed using the dropdown menu. Changing print size does not change the number of pixels that make up an image, so if you reduce an image in size for printing you’ll notice that the resolution, the number of pixels per inch or mm will increase. Similarly if you increase the size of the image you’ll see the resolution decrease. As you increase the size of an image the number of pixels in any given area becomes less as they spread out, this means that if you drastically increase the size of an image you will see the quality of the image decline.

With the above techniques you have a great range of tools to control both the size and resolution of the images and designs you are creating. These are just the tip of the iceberg of GIMP capabilities but they are a good set of tools to learn increasing your confidence as you explore this excellent application.

Adobe Photoshop is the de facto standard for image editing, but it doesn’t come cheap. The basic consumer version, Photoshop Elements, costs around $100 and a subscription that runs professional-grade Photoshop starts at $19.99 a month. Unless you really need the features of genuine Photoshop, there’s a powerful, free alternative in GIMP (The GNU Image Manipulation Program), which is available for Windows, Linux and macOS.

The first hurdle when moving from Photoshop to GIMP is the user interface. GIMP is very different from Photoshop and that can slow your workflow to a crawl. Keyboard shortcuts and menu layout changes can infuriate users. If you have the time and the patience, learning the GIMP user interface isn’t too difficult, but for some folks, it just isn’t as user-friendly as Photoshop’s. 

The GIMP community comes to the rescue and Diolinux’s PhotoGIMP is a complete user interface replacement for GIMP which uses Photoshop as a template. Not only does it replace the UI, but it adds Photoshop shortcuts, icons and Python image filters.

In this how to, we will learn how to install PhotoGIMP on top of the latest version of GIMP.

1. Download the source code zip file and extract the contents to a folder.

2. Open the folder and navigate to the \PhotoGIMP-1.1\.var\app\org.gimp.GIMP\config\GIMP folder. You will see a folder, 2.10 that contains the PhotoGIMP configuration files that will turn GIMP into a Photoshop facsimile.

3. Open a new File Manager window and navigate to C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\GIMP\ a hidden folder where GIMP stores its configuration files. Make sure to change YourUserName to your own.

4. Copy the folder and store it safely in another folder on your drive. This folder contains the configuration files for stock GIMP. We can use a backup of this folder to restore GIMP to stock.

5. Copy the folder, 2.10 from the downloaded archive folder, into your GIMP configuration folder. When prompted to replace files select yes.

6. Open GIMP. The new configuration files will be loaded, and you will see a new PhotoGIMP splash screen.

The PhotoGIMP Layout

The GIMP layout is now replaced with a facsimile of Adobe Photoshop. 

The layout is broken down into four main sections.

1. Document tab: Here is where compositions are created.

2. Palettes: These palettes alter as we use tools.

3. Tools: The toolbox contains all of the tools an artist may need. Some icons, with a small triangle in the bottom right corner have extra tools hidden within. Right click on the icon to open the menu.

4. Layers and Channels: Here we can see all of the layers that make up a composition.

What the heck is a WebP file? It can be hard to keep track of every image format. Most people are familiar enough with JPEG, PNG, and GIF that we don’t even have to write out their full names. But what of High Efficiency Image Container (HEIC) files? How about RAW images that seem to have as many different extensions as there are camera manufacturers? And what is a WebP file again?

We can answer that last one. Google introduced WebP as “a new image format for the Web” in 2010 with intent to “significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites [sic] to load faster than before,” when they relied on image formats “established over a decade ago.” (That's a complaint that seems funny now that WebP itself has been around for 10-plus years.) 

WebP’s Introduction and Spread 

Google was the first to support WebP via the Chromium open source project at the heart of its Chrome browser. It took a while for other companies to embrace the format--Apple didn’t officially support WebP in Safari until the release of iOS 14 and macOS Big Sur last year--but now every major browser should be able to view WebP images without any difficulty.

WebP’s spread to other software also took a while. Consider a few popular image editing apps: GIMP added native support for the format in 2018, Paint.NET introduced WebP support in 2019, and Pixelmator started to support the format in 2020. Many people simply couldn’t manage WebP files outside the browser until nearly a decade after Google announced the format. So it's not exactly surprising if you're just encountering the format now.

There’s a notable app missing from that list, however, and it’s PhotoShop. The leading tool for creative professionals still doesn’t offer native WebP support; PhotoShop users have to rely on a plugin called WebPShop that Google released in 2019. That shouldn’t be difficult, and many PhotoShop users are no strangers to plugins, but it’s still a blow to WebP’s popularity.

Benefits of WebP 

We’ve already established that Google created WebP to help image-heavy websites load faster. The format accomplishes that goal by offering 25-34% greater compression than JPEG files, according to one Google study, without sacrificing visual quality. That alone would give website operators a good reason to choose WebP over JPEG, but that’s not all the format has to offer.

WebP supports lossy images similar to JPEGs, but it can also be used for lossless images, and support for the alpha channel means it can offer similar transparency to PNGs. The format can also be used to present animations, much like GIFs. Google claims animated WebP files have several advantages over GIFs, too, including 19% (lossless) to 64% (lossy) smaller file sizes.

All of this means that in some cases the format offers advantages over existing formats by bringing similar image quality with much smaller file sizes; in others it offers more advanced technology. Google effectively created a triple threat, which means people don’t have to manage multiple image file formats for their websites, especially if they want to prioritize load times.

Drawbacks of WebP 

For years, WebP’s biggest drawback was its limited support. Website operators couldn’t assume that all of their visitors would be able to view images saved using the format, so they had to fall back on the same formats Google was trying to make obsolete. That has become less of a problem as more browsers have added support for the format, however, so WebP should benefit as a result.

Another drawback was the hassle it took to manage WebP files in the first place. The lack of native support in popular apps for the majority of the format’s existence meant people had to create their images, convert them to WebP, and then keep the non-converted version as a backup in case someone visited their website via a browser that didn’t support the format.

WebP essentially needed to become popular before it could become popular. The problem is that it took nearly a decade for that to happen, and now Google’s already working on the next version of the format, according to a new “libwebp2” repository on the company’s Git server. Could that version take as long to catch on with site operators and software developers as its predecessor? 

How to Open WebP Files 

With all that out of the way: The easiest way to open a WebP file is in the browser. That is the format’s intended use case, after all, and it appears to have become increasingly common on popular websites. (At least according to our frustrated attempts to save an image we found online only to grapple with the same issues we’ve described in the text above.)

It’s also easier than ever to work with a WebP file outside the browser. Wikipedia has a list of apps that support the format; we listed some of the more common software above. There’s a good chance you’ll be able to manage WebP files with an up-to-date version of most popular image editing apps… unless you’re one of the countless people using PhotoShop.

PhotoShop users can still work with the format, however, using the WebPShop plug-in. Anyone who simply wants to convert an existing image to WebP can do so using the format’s command-line utility, too, if they prefer. That might not be ideal, but at least it remains an option for people who don’t want to use multiple image editors or fuss around with plug-ins. 

It's October now, which means it's mask season. Or, it would be if this whole year weren't mask season. At any rate, it seems that Nvidia's getting in on the holiday cheer with its newly announced Nvidia Maxine video streaming platform, which (among other features) essentially lets you video chat while wearing a deepfake style mask of...yourself. Maybe the result wasn't intended to be spooky, but looking at Nvidia's video demonstrations, Maxine is perfectly fitting for October. 

Maxine actually comes with a bunch of features, but the one that first caught my eye was its new AI-assisted video compression tool. Have you ever wanted to deepfake your own face? Or turn your own face into a virtual chat avatar to then animate with something like the Facerig tool that's so common among virtual youtubers like Kizuna Ai? Because that's essentially what this tool does, all with the end goal of reducing bandwidth and (maybe) improving video streaming quality.

Essentially, rather than constantly sending video data to whoever you're chatting with, this new video compression tool sends them a static picture of your face, then reads the movements of your lips, eyes, cheeks and other key facial features to animate that picture on the other end using AI. Nvidia gives an example of a video stream using nearly 100KB per frame vs. an AI compressed stream using just 0.12KB per frame, meaning about a 1000X difference in size. The result is a mostly realistic depiction of what you actually look like talking, but with much less data being sent over the network. Emphasis on "mostly."

Because the compression tool isn't actually sending video, but is instead animating a static picture, it has to make some guesses, which results in things like blurry teeth, fuzzy edges and an animatronic style feel on some motions. It's up to you whether a lower bandwidth cost is worth some uncanny valley imagery, but it does kind of feel like a little like an alien is wearing a skin suit in Nvidia's example video.

Assuming those kinks get worked out, it still feels odd that we could eventually live in a future where video chats essentially use computer-generated facsimiles of our own faces...which we would operate using actual video of those same faces. And, like deepfakes, this does raise questions as to potential impersonation. Could I send someone a picture of Tim Cook and just map my facial movements to his face? But given that this is currently being positioned as a developer-focused tool rather than a consumer-facing one, companies might consider the tradeoff in realism worth it for increased performance.

Of course, Maxine doesn't stop just at recreating your face. It's also promising AI-powered 'enhancements,' like Face Re-animation. The concept here is pretty simple. Say you're focusing your eyes on a certain corner of your monitor screen, or tilting your head off to the side so you can look at a second monitor. Much like the AI video compression outlined above, Face Re-animation will use a still reference image and your facial movement data to adjust how you look on camera so that you appear to be looking directly at the screen, with your eyes focused on its center.

Nvidia's example video shows that this still has a ways to go, as the re-animated face is distinctly lower quality than the input data and stutters a bit as it moves to the center. It also comes with the same uncanny valley quality as the AI video compression tool. But assuming this all gets worked out, I could see something like this being helpful for workers who need to multitask during meetings, or even students dealing with overly aggressive virtual learning software punishing them for not looking directly at the screen.

On a less unsettling end of the spectrum, Maxine also promises AI-assisted video upscaling, which could help those who don't have the best webcams, as well as similar features to RTX Voice's noise reduction and Nvidia Broadcast's auto-frame. Nvidia's demo video also briefly shows off tools for live language translation and for mapping facial movements to cartoon avatars, which might help offset the uncanny valley nature of Maxine's AI compression and Face Re-animation tools. We currently don't know much about these features, but they seem like they'd be genuinely helpful regardless of whether someone is a developer or not.

For now, Nvidia Maxine isn't coming straight to consumers. Instead, Nvidia's offering free cloud access to it to third-party firms, who can then use it to improve their own software. That's probably good, because while running these tools locally off your own RTX cards could improve performance, keeping them to the cloud will make them more accessible to the average person and will go further toward normalizing them. Still, communications firm Avaya is the only partner to have currently announced that it's using Maxine, so don't expect to see these features popping up in your Zoom calls anytime soon.

All jokes aside, as work-from-home continues to be the new normal across plenty of industries, it's not surprising to see companies like Nvidia step up to try to make these spaces easier and more professional. Even if it means they have to walk through the uncanny valley first.

Because there are so many RGB components and accessories, there are just a ton of RGB control panel applications that let you customize your light patterns. However, Thermaltake's new NeonMaker software is something different, because it allows you to create and edit lighting animations in much the same way you'd piece together a video clip.

Available for download right now on Thermaltake's website. NeonMaker allows you to build and save animations that are up to 45 seconds long, using any components that are part of the company's RGB Plus ecosystem. We had a chance to use NeonMaker at Thermaltake's CES 2020 suite and were impressed with its capabilities. 

In the application, all the eligible components appear as icons at the top of the screen and you can drag them around to represent their position in the case.  The setup in our demo was simply a series of Riing Quad case fans so all the icons were the same, but a Thermaltake rep said that other types of coolers such as AIOs would have icons that looked like the products do in real life. 

You can then click on each icon and set its colors. Each RGB device the has its own row in the overall timeline just like each video or audio clip has its own timeline when  you're crafting videos in editors like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. 

Once you're done with your animation, you can save it to a file, which you can share with friends or reload the next time you want to use it. NeonMaker does not replace Thermaltake's regular RGB Plus lighting control software; it just adds another way to express yourself through your PC's lighting. 

When Microsoft announced Microsoft Hyperlapse, we were curious to see what it could do. The company boasted that it could take any first-person recorded action video and turn it into a comfortably watchable timelapse. We decided to give it a shot and see what it could do with a simple driving video.

The desktop version of the software uses all the image data to figure out the 3D space recorded, along with the dominant path traveled, and stitches together a "Hyperlapse." It also removes a bunch of still bits from the video, such as when you're taking a quick break or stuck at a traffic light. _­

To test it out, I grabbed a GoPro, mounted it upside-down to the rear-view mirror, and had it looking back while I went for a quick spin.

During the drive, I could see the camera was shaking around quite a bit, so I was curious to see the results of turning it into a simple timelapse, where the software would take every tenth frame or so.

When I got to my destination, I loaded the raw data into GoPro Studio, re-oriented it, and sped it up 8x before exporting it. Once exported, the video actually looked alright:

After that, I exported the full clip at normal speed so that I could import this into Microsoft Hyperlapse. Importing went off without a hitch.

Setting the right options in Hyperlapse was a snap. I selected that I used a GoPro Hero3+ Silver (because that information had been lost in the file data after exporting the video from GoPro Studio), selected the advanced algorithm, left the "speed up factor" slider at 8x, set the resolution to 720p at 60 FPS, and sent it to processing.

Processing is where the troubles began. The video would render up until about 76 percent, at which point it crashed. This happened time after time, and because the software had only been available for a couple of days, resorting to the forums for help was no use. Luckily, on my fourth try it managed to finish rendering successfully, which took well over two hours on a Core i7-4770k at stock clocks.

Below is the video processed by Microsoft Hyperlapse:

We'll let the results speak for themselves. We clearly see the camera trying to follow the dominant path, although it does have a delay and doesn't always seem to know what to look at. That may be due to the car's interior occupying a large portion of the view. What is nice is that it cuts out the long still bits, meaning you don't have to watch me grab a mint and tuck a cable out of sight.

However, the problem with this attempt was that the original video was actually quite good, leading me to wonder if I'd used Hyperlapse in the wrong conditions? I therefore did what any good Dutchman would do: I went for a bike ride. A bike ride let me mount the camera with a first-person view, and I intentionally biked around moving side-to-side excessively and found some wobbly roads to see how Hyperlapse would cope with very shaky video. Basically, I set out to make the worst source footage I could within 10 minutes. Below are both the videos, with the plain one up top.

Clearly, the original timelapse is unwatchable. Of course (take my word for it), the source video that runs at normal speed at 60 FPS is also hardly watchable due to the side-to-side movements. After letting Microsoft Hyperlapse have a go at it, though, it actually looks very good. Hyperlapse completely worked out the shakiness and erratic camera movement and created a nice, smooth timelapse. Granted, it moves around a bit, which makes it seem like I was a drunk cyclist, but that's a sacrifice I can accept.

Would we recommend Microsoft Hyperlapse? Well, that depends on the kind of video you're making. For the driving video, where it was mounted on a static place, it clearly doesn't really help. In fact, I'd say that it even ruins the video. However, if you feed Microsoft Hyperlapse some proper action video, it can certainly make something very watchable and even enjoyable out of it. Now, if only there was a free version of the software that doesn't leave a huge watermark...

You can download Microsoft Hyperlapse here, and it is available for Android, Windows Phone (select models), Microsoft Azure and Windows. We used the Microsoft Hyperlapse Pro version for these videos.

Follow Niels Broekhuijsen @NBroekhuijsen. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

This week, Adobe announced the 2014 update to their Creative Cloud suite and its expanded mobile offerings. With the 2014 version of their Creative Cloud, Adobe has updated the applications therein -- 14 of them -- to varying degrees. Some applications get more updates than others, while many of the applications receive features that were formerly the province of their other apps.

Photoshop CC has added new Blur Gallery filters that allow you to give a sense of motion to 2D images. The interface for handling 3D objects once loaded into Photoshop has been streamlined to make it easier for users to interact with, place, light and texture the objects within Photoshop. New 3D capabilities allow users to convert 2D objects into actual 3D objects and then export them for printing -- even directly uploading them to Shapeways and selecting your materials within the Photoshop interface. Smart Objects have been improved, allowing imbedded objects to be updated externally and the changes to be carried across multiple projects. The Focus Mask allows you to mask objects based on the depth of field. That is, object in focus and out of focus will be masked separately. Layer Comps have been improved, allowing you to take changes made to one layer and cascade them across other layers in the document. Live font preview has been added to Photoshop, so instead of applying each font selection and waiting to see how it looks, you can instead see them in your document as you select them. The Photoshop interface has been improved on Windows 8 touch devices, allowing pinch-based zooming and smoother strokes on these devices. Smart Guides have been improved and made more consistent with how they work in Illustrator, making layer alignments fast and easy. Photoshop CC also makes more extensive use of GPU acceleration in UI operations like zooming. Adobe simply says it has "enhanced Mercury Graphics Engine performance."

Illustrator CC 2014 has new Live Shapes, allowing rectangles to be quickly transformed into complex shapes (and back) with a few clicks. Also new to Illustrator CC 2014 is GPU acceleration of vector graphics rendering "on Windows with an Adobe-certified NVIDIA graphics card," which can be understood to mean it is using CUDA. Pen tool use is now previewed live in the window. Users can now sync Typekit fonts back to their desktop, making them available for other applications.

InDesign CC 2014 spotlights new features for dragging and dropping rows and columns within tables for easy rearrangement, support for export to a fixed-layout EPUB so that graphically rich ebooks can be seen as designed, and seamless updates allowing your custom settings to be automatically imported when the application is updated.

Muse CC 2014 has been rebuilt with 64-bit native support. The interface has been revised with a new Dark UI reminiscent of the other CC applications. Extensive reworking under the hood allows in-application previews of the various desktop and mobile versions of your page design without leaving the application, and design changes to the UI to make it look, feel and work more like other CC applications. It even allows for a certain amount of in-browser editing, allowing clients to make changes to their sites without having to push things back to the designer. The new release is rounded out with Creative Cloud add-ons like UI widgets, menus and navigation scripts that can be imported and personalized for your project, and HiDPI support for both Windows and OS X. Upon seeing Muse CC 2014 demonstrated at the Adobe presentation video, many designers were exclaiming that Muse CC 2014 is "finally ready for prime time."

Premiere Pro CC 2014 has Live Text templates making titling faster and easier, and features in-app access to Masking and Tracking features that were formerly exclusively the province of After Effects. With Master Clip Effects, an adjustment made to the Master Clip in your timeline -- for instance, color correction -- ripples down to every part of that clip in your sequence. Mercury Playback Engine performance has been improved, specifically its OpenCL performance, and Adobe has added a GPU-based debayering for RED media. It adds support for new camera formats as well as improving support for some other formats. Integration between Premiere and Speedgrade is improved, making working between the two faster and easier.

After Effects CC 2014 has the other portion of Live Templates: the ability to create a template for Premiere Pro, within After Effects. This means that a title, lower third, or another graphic containing text can be created in After Effects and exported as a Live Text template. The template can then be used in Premiere and the text can be changed without editing the rest of the template. Masks made in Premiere Pro can be shared with After Effects and dynamically linked to later work. Animation with a mask will be picked up by Premiere, which means you can use After Effects to refine a rough mask made in Premiere and have that mask update within the Premiere project. Additional filters added to this version will allow better keying of less-than-ideal footage, especially highly compressed footage like h.264. Kuler and Typekit have also been integrated into After Effects, like they are in other Adobe applications. After Effects CC 2014 also adds Mercury Transmit, allowing you to use a connection from your graphics card (an HDMI port, usually) for external playback of previews without additional hardware.

Improvements to Adobe's web authoring tools include the ability to look at and mark up a document within Quick View in Dreamweaver CC 2014 without having to flip in and out of Quick View, SVG export in Flash Pro CC, and native HTML5 video support in Edge Animate CC.

Adobe also announced a new Creative SDK that allows access to files in the Creative cloud, and also includes within its library methods for accessing element within PSDs. It also allows the use of cloud image editing services like the aforementioned Content-aware Fill within your app. The Adobe Creative SDK was used to build Photoshop Mix, a new application for image compositing and masking on the iPad, and is currently targeted for iOS development. IT is being tested by select iOS developers and is expected to enter into a comprehensive beta shortly.

The Adobe Creative Cloud 2014 releases are available now. Pricing varies by plan, and includes a new Creative Cloud Photography Plan for $9.99 a month that gives you Photoshop and Lightroom -- a good idea considering those are their most popular apps. $120/yr for Photoshop isn't bad at all.

GIMP is a popular image editing tool that is free and easy to use, once you get the hang of it. It might take you a while to get to know the product inside and out, but the Tom's Guide team has put together a list of tips and tricks to get you started and well on your way to mastering the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Check them out in 'Tips and Tricks for Using GIMP.'

The GNU Image Manipulation Program, more commonly known by the acronym GIMP, is a free and powerful open-source graphicsmanipulation tool that can be used for everything from photo manipulation and clean up to digital painting. In development since 1995, GIMP is something of an open-source darling, sometimes being called the "free Photoshop." In this case, you don't short change yourself when you decide to go free and open source. Of course, as with any powerful tool, it takes time to learn its functions, and there are a lot of extra tools you can add to make it that much more powerful. Here are a few basics to keep in mind, one or two tutorials, and a grab bag of useful GIMP plugins to enhance an already excellent program. Tips and Tricks for Using GIMP

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Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), universal formats for audio and video don't exist. While some may be more popular than others, chances are you'll find yourself trying to convert from one format to another at some point in your life. That's not always an easy task, though. As such, the Tom's Guide team has put together a list of the best audio and video conversion tools. Be sure to check out '10 Free Conversion Tools for Your Audio and Video' for the full list!
 

The boom in digital media has resulted in numerous file formats for audio and video content of varying quality and ubiquity, whether you consume your media on desktop, smartphone, tablet, or dedicated media device. Some, such as MP3 and MP4, are practically ubiquitous, playable on just about any player or device worth its salt, while more esoteric formats such as OGG and FLAC might possess technical advantages, but might be unsupported on some media players and devices. Fortunately, conversion software can come to the rescue, allowing you to input your media files, and then convert them into another format. Check out these free audio and video conversion tools that can be of use whether you just want to convert a troublesome format or shrink your media into a more mobile-friendly form.10 Free Conversion Tools for Your Audio and Video

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At Adobe MAX 2013 in Los Angeles on Monday, Adobe let loose with a pretty earth-shattering announcement...

Creative Suite 6 is the last Creative Suite release from Adobe. Though it will continue to be available for sale and supported, Adobe is moving its focus to the Adobe Creative Cloud.

With this shift, the Adobe applications are being rebranded using the Creative Cloud name, becoming the new set of 'CC' desktop applications instead of 'CS'. Presumably, this also resets the version numbers again.

The 'CC' release of Adobe desktop applications includes a host of new collaboration features, extended project space on the Adobe Cloud servers, and features for collaboration with and viewing on mobile devices. It also features integration with the Behance online creative community.

The updated Adobe 'CC' products, Photoshop CC, Indesign CC, Illustrator CC, Dreamweaver CC, and Premiere Pro CC, will only be available through creative cloud subscriptions. This represents a major shift from Adobe to a software as a service model as opposed to the more traditional Suites packaging. Really, it means there will be no 'packaging' at all, just downloads.

Tue Creative Cloud installers themselves will be slightly revamped to support the installation of either the CS or CC revisions of the applications in order to meet the user needs. No word as to how long the prior version will be left available -- in two years, when CC 2 comes out, will you still be able to install and use CS? Only time will tell.

Plans and Prices

Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions come with a variety of plans. There is a 'single application' plan, for $19.99 a month that allows you to download and install one application- they even figure most people will use it for Photoshop. The normal Creative Cloud membership is $49.99 per month with a one-year contract, and allows you to install all of Adobe's major applications, giving you the equivalent of the Adobe Master Collection, which retails for $2599 for a full copy and $1049 as an upgrade, for $599.88 a year. People who own CS 3 to CS 5.5 can get their Creative Cloud membership for $29.99 per month for the first year. Teachers and students can get the membership for $19.99 per month. There is also promotional pricing (at a rate not mentioned) for CS6 users.

Above the individual memberships is the team version, which improves on the individual membership by giving 100GB of storage instead of 20 GB, and centralized administration abilities. Team membership to the Creative Cloud costs $69.99 per seat, with a reduced rate of $39.99 per seat for users of CS3 or later. There are also more specific plans aimed at enterprise and educational customers.

Adobe expects the new Creative Cloud and new CC versions of their applications to be available June 17.

After the head of a state lawmaker in Georgia was placed on a porn star's body via the use of Photoshop, he is now pushing for a bill that would ban lewd Photoshopping.

Rep. Earnest Smith pointed towards the image created by a blogger who used it to mock the politician. Outraged with the photo, he is now backing a bill that would see lewd Photoshopping become a crime punishable by a $1,000 fine. The legislator stressed that he's not worried that the bill would violate First Amendment rights.

"Everyone has a right to privacy," he told Fox News. "No one has a right to make fun of anyone. It’s not a First Amendment right." When asked for details on the bill, the lawmaker refused to do so. "At this juncture, I am not at liberty to share anything with you. I don’t have to. If and when this bill passes we can revisit the issue and if I choose to give you details at that time I will, but until then I don’t have to tell you anything," he said.

Smith initially introduced the legislation in 2012 after a teenage girl was subjected to "online attacks," but decided to renew efforts to see it being passed after viewing a picture of his head Photoshopped on the body of a naked man stretched out on rocks.

The bill’s summary said it would make it a misdemeanor offense to modify a photograph that "causes an unknowing person wrongfully to be identified as the person in an obscene depiction." Upon being asked if he thought the bill would target parodies, which are protected by the First Amendment, he stressed that it didn't matter.

"They (parody creators) live for something like this," Smith said. "They are vulgar. This is about being vulgar. We’re becoming a nation of vulgar people." Another lawmaker responded to the bill by stating that Smith is "the conductor of his own crazy train."

Behind the Photoshopped pictures of Smith was Georgia Politics Unfiltered blogger Andre Walker. "I did exactly what Rep. Smith wants to make illegal," Walker said on the bill, which he branded as "asinine." "I pasted a picture of Smith’s head onto the body of a male porn star."

"The first Amendment to the Constitution of the United States protects all forms of speech, not just spoken word. It attempts to regulate speech and I doubt it would stand up in a court of law. I cannot believe Rep. Earnest Smith thinks I’m insulting him by putting his head on the body of a well-built porn star."

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MKV is a multimedia container format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture, or subtitle tracks in one file. MKV creation and editing tools are very popular nowadays -- they let people grab videos from discs or do the reverse (burn these movies onto optical media). If you're new to all of this, don't panic. The team over on Tom's Guide has put together a list of 10 editors along with a brief description of what they do in '10 Tools for Creating and Editing MKVs.'

For the uninitiated, MKV is a multimedia container format that stores all of a movie's information in one file. The full name of the format is the Matroska Multimedia Container, named after that set of Russian dolls "of decreasing size placed one inside the other."As one MKV can contain all the data you need to watch a movie, the video, audio, image, and subtitle tracks, MKV creation and editing tools are very popular nowadays. They let people grab videos from discs or do the reverse (burn these movies onto optical media).With that in mind, let's go through the 10 tools that will let you work with MKVs.10 Tools for Creating and Editing MKVs

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Programs like Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Maya are pretty expensive. However, these are the kinds of tools that artists working in digital mediums need to edit, perfect, or sometimes even create their work. Whether it's your job, or simply just a hobby, these kinds of programs are definitely an investment. However, there is also a ton of tools that aim to offer a free alternative to each of the aforementioned programs as well as others. Take a look at the Tom's Guide team's top 15 in today's '15 Free PC Tools for Artists.'

As computers became more powerful (and more user-friendly), their potential as creative machines has increased leaps and bounds. Stunning graphic designs and easily-understood visuals are literally a handful of clicks and keyboard presses away, especially if you rely on the fifteen pieces of software we list here. Even better: all of our selections cost nothing to download, save for the money you'll spend on your net connection and electricity. 15 Free PC Tools for Artists

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Fast Action Behind Still Photos

The processing loads common in video editing are well known; it doesn’t take more than a couple of 1080p tracks and a filter or two to soak up 100% of CPU resources in many systems. However, not as many people appreciate the significant compute burden imposed by modern digital photography workloads. Adding a sepia filter to an eight-megapixel (MP) image may be no big deal, but how about a complex blur to an 18 MP RAW image?

Even if your editing tasks don't swamp your CPU, they can still take a significant amount of time to execute, especially for multi-image batch jobs. More time means more waiting. For professionals, that translates to a loss of income. And pauses in your workflow prevent you from operating at the pace of your creativity, stopping you dead in your tracks. You want to edit as the creative options stream through your mind.

The object of the game, of course, is to devise new ways of getting more processing work done in less time. In two prior articles, we examined how modern GPUs, including those embedded within CPUs and APUs (compute engines with on-die graphics capabilities), can be leveraged by industry standard APIs to accelerate highly parallel operations within video post-processing and games. The same is now increasingly true within the world of photo editing.

Adobe, for example, has a long and impressive history of adopting hardware technologies that lend themselves well to accelerating media operations. The company has used OpenGL to accelerate certain functions through the GPU within Photoshop since version CS4, and such use has expanded with each subsequent release. Now, with the introduction of Photoshop CS6, the program opens its doors to OpenCL as a means to achieve even broader GPU-based acceleration.

Adobe is not alone. An intriguing but little-known photo workflow tool called Musemage now leverages OpenGL and OpenCL throughout its many workflow stages. The ever-popular open source photo editor GIMP now similarly employs these APIs in several areas. We also acquired a pre-release version of Corel’s AfterShot Pro, tweaked by Corel to bring early OpenCL support online specifically for our testing here.

We will test each of these applications across five system configurations and look for patterns in the results. How much does open standards-based GPU acceleration really help in these image-oriented tasks? Is there a difference in how much APUs and GPUs leverage accelerated features? Does acceleration scale evenly with graphics horsepower? Let’s find out.

Q&A: Under The Hood With AMD

One of our core objectives in this series on heterogeneous computing is to get a better understanding of some of the decisions surrounding OpenCL and DirectCompute. Why would a vendor choose to utilize them instead of other APIs, such as OpenGL or DirectX? What are these programming interfaces doing with data behind the scenes? What are their limits and how much untapped potential do they leave on the table?

Those are the questions you don’t see answered in marketing materials. Fortunately, we were able to corner two excellent authorities for this article and start gathering some answers. First up is Alex Lyashevsky, a performance application engineer at AMD and a senior member of the technical staff brought in from AMD’s acquisition of ATI in 2006. Lyashevsky is no talking head from marketing. He holds patents on parallel lossless image compression and the world’s first GPU-based H.264 decoder. Few people understand GPGPU computing as well as Lyashevsky, and fewer still can discuss it in the same breath as OpenCL acceleration.

Tom's Hardware: Photoshop CS6 is our headliner benchmarking app for this article, and Photoshop is no stranger to OpenGL. So why are we now getting OpenCL added into the mix?

Alex Lyashevsky: OpenGL is pretty widely used, and it actually has many of the same compute capabilities as OpenCL. However, OpenGL is targeted more towards graphics. When you run OpenGL, you usually assume there is some kind of an image or buffer you are trying to draw upon. OpenCL actually provides much more of a generic programming platform, more in the sense of computational domain. You can have an absolutely free way of defining your own computational domain instead of being attached to some kind of image or two-dimensional, pixel-based guestimation. Other than that, frankly, I sometimes encourage people to use OpenGL, because it has very good hardware-supported input buffer filtering, for example, and very efficient color buffer composting on output.

Tom's Hardware: For developers, is there a significant difference between the two APIs in coding?

Alex Lyashevsky: Programming the OpenGL shader language is a difficult thing to get on top of. OpenCL may be a bit easier for developers. You see, OpenGL assumes that you have to set up some graphic context, meaning you have to set up viewpoint, model matrix transformations, and so on. OpenGL is a graphical language, and this works well for some types of operations where graphics are related to the computation problem. But from a general programmer’s point of view, OpenGL is kind of nonsense. If they want to do data manipulation, why should they set up a triangle, viewpoint, or matrix? A more general way to program the GPU, which is enabled by OpenCL, is necessary for more widespread adoption. For example, it’s probably not very useful to use OpenGL to accelerate something like deflate and encryption in compression apps, but it is probably useful for image processing apps.

Q&A: Under The Hood With AMD, Cont.

Tom's Hardware: How much enthusiasm have you found in the developer community? Are they coming to you saying, “Help us out—get us running with OpenCL”?

Alex Lyashevsky: Well, there is no resistance. Frankly, using something like OpenCL is not easy, but I try to break the psychological barrier. People start using OpenCL and often, because it is cumbersome, they won’t get the performance they expect from the marketing claims, so they assume it doesn’t work. Users think it’s a marketing ploy and they won’t use it. My goal is to break the barriers and show that there is a lot of benefit. How to do that is another matter. The problem is that it is not exactly C. It’s not that it’s quite different from C; it’s the problem of mindset. You have to understand that you are really dealing with massively parallel problems. It’s more a problem of people understanding how to run parallel 32 or 64 synchronous threads, and this prevents wider, easier adoption.

From there, you probably know there are architectural problems. There are system-wide performance concerns, because we need to move data from the CPU or system sides, or “system heaps” as we say, to the video heap to get the best performance. That movement, first of all, causes a problem and resistance. Second, on a system level, it decreases performance because you need to move the data. The question is how efficiently you move it. That’s what we explain how to do, even without optimal efficiency. The future will have a fully unified memory as part of HSA, and it’s physically unified on our APUs, but not unified on our discrete offerings. So, to get the best performance from our device, you have to use specialized memory or a specialized bus. This is another piece of information that people miss when they start developing with OpenCL. People come with some simplified assumption and feel that they cannot or should not differentiate CPU architectures from GPU architectures. And fortunately or unfortunately—it’s difficult to say—while OpenCL is guaranteed to work on both sides, there is no guarantee that CPU and GPU performance will be equal on both sides. You have to program knowing that you are coding for the GPU, not the CPU, to make the best use of OpenCL on the GPU.

Tom's Hardware: In a nutshell, what is your mission? What message mustget through to developers?

Alex Lyashevsky: First of all, you must understand that you have to move data. Second, understand that your programming must massively parallelize the data. And third, almost the same as the second, you have to understand that optimization is achieved through parallel processing. You have to understand the architecture you are programming for. That’s the purpose of the help we are providing to developers, and it’s starting to really pay off. We have surveys of developers in multiple geographies showing that OpenCL is gaining a lot of momentum.

Tom's Hardware: Let’s talk about APU in the context of mobile computing and power. Have the rules of power-savings algorithms changed? Does an APU throttle differently depending on AC or battery power?

Alex Lyashevsky: On CPU, I’m afraid this is the same thing. The memory and power management system is very sophisticated, and sometimes it depends on the grading system. The grading system has most of the rights to decrease activity. But our GPU is pretty adaptive, and its activity sometimes even affects our performance management. If you don’t put reasonable load pressure on our hardware, it will try to be as low-power as possible. It basically slows itself down when it doesn’t have enough work to do. So yeah, it is adaptive. I couldn’t say that it’s absolutely great, but we try to make it as power-efficient as possible.

Test Platforms

As in our prior stories, we used the following test configurations:

With luck, we will be adding a new Trinity (next-gen AMD APU)-based notebook to the above heterogeneous compute platforms. Unfortunately, review units weren’t available in time for our testing here.

Applications: GIMP, AfterShot Pro, And Musemage

For this article, we tested with four applications: GIMP, Corel AfterShot Pro, Musemage, and Adobe Photoshop CS6.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), an open source project since 1995, is pretty much the go-to app for anyone who doesn’t want to pay for an image/graphics editor. The title is brimming with advanced features ranging from channels and paths to animation and pattern tools. While we tested under Windows, there are versions for several operating systems, including Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, and even AmigaOS 4. Specifically, we tested with the version 2.8 build released on April 2, 2012, that incorporated OpenCL support for 19 filters. We accessed three of these filters (Gaussian blur, bilateral, and motion blur) through the Generic Graphics Library (GEGL) menu list that first started appearing in GIMP 2.6. AMD described GEGL to us like so:

“GEGL is a floating-point-based processing pipeline that will be the foundation for the next upcoming major release of GIMP. GEGL requires more computational power than the baseline GIMP pipeline, which is 8-bit-based. While the computation requirements are high, floating-point does provide flexibilities that 8-bit processing just can’t match. Since GEGL is going to be the future of GIMP processing, we have focused our OpenCL work with GIMP on accelerating the GEGL pipeline (as opposed to the baseline GIMP pipeline). As such, only GEGL operations will experience OpenCL acceleration. GEGL is being integrated piece by piece into GIMP, and that’s why you see special menus for GEGL operation in this build and in the near future, until it’s fully integrated in GIMP, at which point there will not be a special menu for GEGL since everything will be GEGL.”

In speaking with GIMP/GEGL developer Victor Oliveira, we gained an interesting insight. OpenGL is inherently made for graphics processing, and I’d long assumed that OpenCL was much the same, only aimed at somewhat different graphical tasks. However, it turns out that the API is more robust and flexible than most people appreciate.

“OpenCL not only gives GPU acceleration, but we can also use OpenCL in the CPU to provide good multi-threading, which GIMP lacked, and vectorization support,” says Oliveira. “Notice that GIMP's audience is very heterogeneous, so if we want to, for example, support the AVX instruction set in our code, we would have to generate two builds, because it wouldn't work on older machines, or detect it on runtime. Either option is bad. With OpenCL, we can do that while distributing just one build, it's a really interesting technology.

Our GIMP build has command line options for running with or without OpenCL support, as well as displaying a debug window that shows benchmarking results. For a test file, we used a 4096x2048 30 MB bitmap image.

Corel’s AfterShot Pro is a non-destructive photo workflow application. From a technical perspective, this means that every time an image is opened, edited, or output, ASP reapplies all of the image processing, starting at the very earliest step of decoding the image content all the way though rendering the final image on-screen. Throughout this process, no data is eliminated. A better metaphor may be to say that changes are stacked, and users can modify any change made within that stack. Of course, if that stack is flattened or merged, then the non-destructive workflow vanishes.

We obtained a special preview build of ASP from Corel that implements OpenCL in such a way that it helps accelerate file conversions. So we gathered a batch of 50 RAW images, each measuring 6048x4032 and roughly 37 MB, and used ASP to batch convert them into JPG with and without OpenCL assistance.

Musemage is a newer and lesser-known photo editor deserving of a larger audience. As we hear from AMD, this application was the work of several engineers in China, which explains a lot. Technically, the app is a marvel of utility and convenience for photo manipulation, especially for batch editing, but it seems to have received practically no marketing here in America. This is unfortunate because, unlike so many editing tools that have bolted-on GPU-based acceleration as an iterative afterthought, Musemage was built from the ground up with such acceleration.

In our Musemage batch test, we used eight JPEG images supplied by JLucasPhoto.com, each of 10 to 12 MP, totaling 35.4 MB of data. Musemage hosts dozens of adjustments, color effects, lens effects, distortions, resizing options, and so on. During the batch run, we applied eleven of these processes onto each image: Auto Contrast, Auto White Balance, Gaussian Blur (4.0 pixels), Color Denoising (0.8 pixel), Negative Film (highlight 50, shadow 50), Advanced Defog (threshold 0.10, strength 0.65), Vignetting (FoV angle 45), Soften Skin (radius 3.3 pixels, strength 0.05, whiten 0.02), Horizontal Flip, Resize (150% fixed width and height), and Add Text (40% opacity).

Applications: Adobe Photoshop CS6

One common definition of heterogeneous computing is the integration of graphics capabilities on the same die as the CPU (central processing unit). This isn’t quite how Adobe uses the term. Rather, Adobe takes a more systemic view, looking for all the ways in which its software can leverage computing resources, and then discovering which areas of the system best provide those resources. As the company told us, heterogeneous computing is “multiple instruction sets and types of code in the same computer, and utilizing all those resources to give the users a better experience.”

The new Photoshop CS6 illustrates this very well. From its years-ago roots as a multi-threading pioneer to its just-added entrance into OpenCL, Photoshop looks for ways to accelerate features wherever they can be feasibly found. The object of the game is to never delay the user’s experience. Ideally, filters should apply in real-time, and a system should handle 30 layers on a 30-megapixel image with ease. Traditionally, we would have counted on CPU advances to make this dream a reality, but as we've seen from both AMD and Intel lately, expecting major leaps forward in processor performance will likely set you up for a bad time. Today, progress is being facilitated through the integration and utilization of many different subsystems (including the GPU), faster pipes, more parallelism, and so on.

Because different software features and disparate workloads benefit from a variety of hardware design decisions, it’s impossible to have a complete discussion of GPU-based acceleration without examining the ways speed-ups are achieved. Photoshop CS6 introduces support for OpenCL in its Blur Gallery filter tools. Meanwhile, Photoshop continues to build on its OpenGL capabilities by accelerating many functions, including Liquify, adaptive wide angle, transform, warp, puppet warp, lighting effects, and pretty much every 3D feature (shadows, vanishing point, sketch rendering, etc.), except the ray tracer. Additionally, OpenGL powers the oil paint filter, while new features like background saving are threaded, which is really handy on very large jobs.

Despite Adobe being a large company and Photoshop being one of the industry’s most renowned applications, the Photoshop team is surprisingly small: fewer than 60 software and quality engineers. In our discussions, Adobe quipped at one point, “Throwing more bodies at a problem doesn't always make software better.” Especially given this relatively small head count, it’s doubly remarkable that Adobe has tightened its revision times from 18 to 24 months down to 12. Just keep in mind that faster revision cycles will likely mean a slower apparent adoption of a given new technology from version to version.

Adobe provided us with two scripts for testing its latest OpenCL and OpenGL performance. In the first case, the choice was inevitable: Blur Gallery, the only family of OpenCL-accelerated filters in the application. We ran four iterations of a general blur effect being applied to a 60.2 MB, 5615x3744 PSD file. Tests were either RGB or CMYK, and they applied a blur value of either 25 or 300, giving us four tests per blur group. The script ran the effect seven times and output a CSV file, from which we pulled the average time to complete the filter effect.

Adobe supplied a very similar script for its OpenGL-based Liquify filter, which had no varying parameters.

Note that we controlled GPU acceleration through Photoshop’s Preferences > Performance > Graphics Processor Settings options. In this area, unchecking the Use Graphics Processor box will disable all OpenGL and OpenCL acceleration, which turned out to be the only way to get accurate results for non-accelerated tests. The Advanced Settings button will spawn a pop-up with check boxes for OpenGL (unintuitively called Use Graphics Processor to Accelerate Computation) and OpenCL. Apparently, unchecking both of these still leaves OpenGL enabled.

Q&A: Under The Hood With Adobe

No vendor commands more respect or has a longer pedigree in the photo editing world than Adobe, so we felt it important to get an in-depth developer’s look at OpenCL from someone with extensive knowledge of how the Photoshop is designed and how it evolves across versions. Russell Williams is the principal scientist and architect on Adobe’s Photoshop team. Look closely and you’ll see that his is the third name listed on the Photoshop CS6 splash screen. His job is to handle the program’s technical direction and make decisions on which technologies should be used, how much focus should be put on them, and how the team is going to make it happen.

Tom's Hardware: From dual-thread support to OpenGL, Photoshop has a long history of adopting new acceleration optimizations. But you can’t adopt everything. What decision process do you use when weighing new acceleration options?

Russell Williams: We don't have a single process. One important thing is that we have a fixed amount of resources. We have a certain amount of time. The team is a certain size. Each time we go through what will be in the next version, performance is one of the things that has to be traded off. Just like any new feature, we evaluate how much bang for the buck we can get. For instance, improving start-up time is not a sexy performance issue, but it affects every user and has a huge impact on perceptions of how fast Photoshop is. It also affects productivity—you don't need to have a break in your thought process while waiting for the app to launch.

Tom's Hardware: With CS 6, we’re seeing the first bits of OpenCL creeping into Photoshop. From the development side, how long did it take to integrate that support? Hasn’t OpenCL been around long enough for it to have at least started in 5.5?

Russell Williams: We usually don’t implement major new features or functions in most dot releases (such as CS 5.5). So, if you go back to CS5, that was shipping in spring 2010, but that means we were designing and implementing features starting in late 2008. OpenCL wasn't maturing and didn't have cross-platform drivers until at least late 2009, when we were already locking down into final testing mode. Thus CS6 is really the first opportunity we had to implement it.

Tom's Hardware: You have several APIs to choose from for accelerating features. Why pick OpenCL?

Russell Williams: One, it's an open standard and an alternative to other GPU-compute technologies like CUDA or DX Compute. The significance is that open standards work on all platforms. In particular, on Windows, you have the choice to buy one card or another card in many cases. But laptops typically don't offer that flexibility. I don't like leaving platforms behind, and it’s not feasible to rewrite each feature for each platform. If we wrote a feature in CUDA, we'd get only Nvidia cards. If we did DX Compute, we'd only get Windows and not Macs, and even both combined would still miss a big chunk of customers. So cross-platform support for both OS and graphics platforms is very important to us.

The other reason why we’d choose OpenCL and not OpenGL is—well, there's two reasons. With GPU compute languages like OpenCL, they unlock or permit the use of some parts of the hardware’s functionality, such as low-level algorithmic compute capabilities that aren't accessible through OpenGL. And secondly, OpenGL and DirectX are very much designed to do a certain thing: render 3D graphics scenes. And if you want to do anything other than render 3D graphics scenes, you sort of have to think of your problem as "how can I make this look like rendering a 3D graphics scene?" You have to do a lot of graphics setup for that. For programmers trying to accelerate some algorithm on the GPU, trying to make something like CS6’s blur feature (like PS CS6), or any arbitrary function that will go faster with GPU, the people writing those things don't have experience working with 3D graphics rendering. They aren't thinking of their problems in that way, so it's a lot more of a hurdle to use OpenGL. OpenCL gives us the promise of more widespread adoption of GPU technologies across our developers.

Tom's Hardware: There are a bunch of new features and optimizations in CS6, but only one OpenCL-enhanced feature: Blur Gallery. Not to be tactless, but why only one? Is this just a toe in the water? Or are other factors involved?

Russell Williams: You have to start somewhere. The OpenCL ecosystem is just getting there, and we don't have historical expertise in this. OpenCL availability and maturity has only recently become a reality. We intend to do a lot more with it in CS7. Also, we pay close attention to relative returns when looking for features to accelerate. Like, the eye dropper is already fast enough. You have to speed up features that really are disruptively slow to common workflows. You want to make an impact to users, not just speed uncommon things up simply because they're there.

I should add that it's not just us at the beginning of the OpenCL path. The whole industry is at the beginning of having and working with drivers that support OpenCL. When we began CS6, that support was still quite limited. 

Q&A: Under The Hood With Adobe, Cont.

Tom's Hardware: Within Photoshop, what limits exist in terms of what you can do with these APIs?

Russell Williams: With some things, we can look at them and know they're not suited for OCL or the GPU in general. In other cases, it's only after we expend some effort, by implementing it, that we discover we're not going to get the speed-up that will justify the effort. It's well known that the GPU is completely suited for certain kinds of things and completely unsuited for others. I believe it was AMD that told us that that while a GPU can speed up the things it is suited to by several hundred times compared to the CPU, a problem that it is ill-suited to GPUs, something inherently sequential, then it might be 10 times slower.

Some people think, “If the GPU is so much faster, then why not do everything on the GPU?” But the GPU is only suited for certain operations. And for every operation you want to run on there, you have to re-implement it. For instance, we accelerated the Liquify filter with OGL, not OCL, and that makes a tremendous difference. For large brushes, it goes from 1 to 2 FPS to being completely fluid, responsive, and tracking with your pen. That kind of responsiveness for modifying that much data could only be done on a GPU. But it took one engineer most of the entire product development cycle for CS6 to re-implement the whole thing.

Tom's Hardware: Which gets us back to why was only one feature implemented in OCL this time around. You don't have an infinite number of developers and only one year between versions.

Russell Williams: That's right. And, of course, we have an even more limited supply of developers that already know OCL.

Tom's Hardware: Did graphics vendors play a role in your OpenCL adoption? Education, tools, and so forth?

Russell Williams: We didn't have much input on creating the tools they had. But they gave us a tremendous amount of help in both learning OpenCL and in using the tools they have given us. Both Nvidia and AMD gave us support in prototyping algorithms, because both of their interests are to make more use of the GPU. For us, the big issue is where the performance is. We can't count on a particular level of GPU being in a system. Many systems have Intel integrated graphics, which have more limited GPU and OpenGL support, and no OpenCL support. A traditional C-based implementation has to be there, and it’s the only thing we can count on being there. On the other hand, if something is performance-critical, the GPU is really where most of the compute power is in the box.

Beyond that, AMD had their QA/engineering teams constantly available to us. We had weekly calls, access to hardware for testing, and so on. Nvidia and Intel helped, too, but AMD definitely stepped up.

Tom's Hardware: So which company has the better products, AMD or NVIDIA? [laughs]

Russell Williams: You're Tom's Hardware. You know that depends on what you're running and which week you ask the question—and how much money you have in your pocket. That's why it is so critical for us to support both vendors. Well, three if you include Intel integrated graphics, which is starting to become viable.

Tom's Hardware: At some point, performance bottlenecks are inevitable. But how far out do you look when trying to avoid them? Do you say, “Well, we’re already getting five times better performance—that’s good enough!” Or do you push as far as possible until you hit a wall?

Russell Williams: We do think about that, but it’s very hard. It’s impossible to know in a quantitative way, ahead of time, to know what those will be. We know qualitatively that we should spend a lot of time on bandwidth issues. Photoshop is munging pixels, so the number of times that pixels have to be moved from here to there is a huge issue, and we pay attention to every time in the processing pipeline that happens. Quite often, that’s more the limiting factor than just computation being done on the pixels. In particular, when you have discrete graphics, there is an expensive step of moving the pixels to the graphics card and back.

Tom's Hardware: So the bus is usually your bottleneck?

Russell Williams: Yes, the PCI bus. I really expect in the future that APUs will require us to rethink which features can be accelerated. Particularly once APUs start using what some people call zero-copy. When you have an APU, you don't have to go across that long-latency PCI bus to get to the GPU. Right now, you still have to go through the driver, and it still copies from one place in main memory to another place in memory—the space reserved for CPU and another place reserved for GPU. They're working on eliminating that step. And as they make that path more efficient, it becomes more and more profitable to do smaller and smaller operations on the APU, because the overhead on each one is smaller.

On the other hand, APUs are not as fast as discrete GPUs. In some ways, it comes down to on-card memory bandwidth versus main memory. But you can also think of it as power budgets with discrete cards that are sucking down several hundred watts by themselves. You have to keep copying large things across this small pipe to this hairdryer of a compute device. It just depends. There has to be enough computation involved to pay for copying it out across the PCI bus and bringing it back.

Q&A: Under The Hood With Adobe, Cont.

Tom's Hardware: Are we anywhere close to saturating 16 lanes of second-gen PCIe for image editing operations?

Russell Williams: I don't have numbers off the top of my head, but think of a 16-megapixel DSLR image. Say you want to do something, like modifying the tilt of the blur plane in the blur gallery, and you want to get feedback in real-time—30 to 60 FPS. Then you have to composite the result with 50 other layers, and that compositing needs to be done back on the CPU, because the entire compositing engine isn't done on the GPU. So copying data back at 60 FPS, you're copying the full image that's being processed two or three times per frame. Suddenly, that PCIe doesn't look as fast as you originally thought.

Or look at it from a different point of view. Regardless of whether PCIe is fast enough, what matters is how fast it is compared to how fast the computation out on the card is. If the on-card computation takes half as long as before, the trip across the bus can mean that you only sped up the entire thing by 10% or so. I have a pithy metaphor: it's like driving to New York to make a sandwich.

Tom's Hardware: Say what?

Russell Williams: If you want to make a sandwich, and you invent a machine that can make your sandwich in two seconds, it still doesn't make sense to drive to New York to use the machine when you live in California. The shorter latency of the APU empowers us to use the GPU in all sorts of ways that don't make sense for discrete graphics. Really, the APU is a new kind of compute device. In the future, it's likely our code will have quite a few cases where it says "if discrete GPU, use discrete" but quite a few more that say "if APU, use APU."

Tom's Hardware: What about the future of shaders in a time of OpenCL and similar APIs. Adobe has taken a proprietary approach with Pixel Bender, but do you see this continuing as the market shifts to open standards?

Russell Williams: Shaders have a very solid future. Graphics APIs like OpenGL and DirectX are not going anywhere. OpenGL with custom shaders still provides the best solution for problems that are similar to 3D rendering, like 3D rendering in Photoshop or the Liquify filter. Now, I can’t speak for Adobe on this, but my own opinion is that GPGPU programming has come a long way since Adobe started Pixel Bender, and now that there's an industry standard—OpenCL—that addresses this area, we're adding more emphasis to that. We're members of Khronos, and we'll be contributing the experience we gained designing and building Pixel Bender to help improve future versions of OpenCL.

Tom's Hardware: My own impression is that many people still view CPUs with integrated graphics—APUs—as a budget solution. Maybe it’s just a habit from so many years of suffering with graphics-equipped Intel northbridges, I don’t know. But today...has the market shifted? Is APU and heterogeneous architecture really a game-changer?

Russell Williams: There are different sources of compute power in the box. It used to be there was just one—the CPU—and you wrote in C to use that resource. Now, a great deal of power is in the GPU, but it’s only suited for some problems. And a great deal of the CPU is in multiple cores and compute units, like vector units, which are only good at certain problems. In order to use the compute resources and utilize the performance of the machine, you have to use all the different kinds of units and resources in the machine. You have to "light up" all these things at the same time, with the CPU, GPU, vector units, and so on all doing the things they're best at. We're trying to use them all at once to give the user the most responsive experience. We're trying to move away from “fill out a dialog box, click OK, and watch the progress bar” to a more game-like, cinematic FPS experience, where you modify the image directly and get immediate feedback. The only way to do that is to utilize all the compute resources.

The significance of having integrated performance plus highly capable graphics is it moves this capability into more platforms. Many platforms that don't have the space, cost, or power budget for discrete. The APU-based solutions give you a tremendous potential performance boost in those environments. The other critical impact of APU is performance. We have a fixed power budget, and we don't know how to make a CPU go faster in a significant way on that power budget. We've seen the last of the 50% per year performance boosts on the CPU side. And we're not going to just keep scaling cores—it’s too difficult to make use of them. The number of programs that could really take advantage of a 24-core single-socket CPU is near zero. So the GPU is essentially the path to bring that transistor budget to users in a way that can be used.

I think that GPGPU and APUs are just beginning to deliver on the promise that many people have seen in them for many years. We'll see a lot more advantage taken of that, not just in Photoshop, but in other Adobe apps over the next couple of versions.

Benchmark Results: GIMP

Our early GIMP testing threw us a bit of a curve ball. We originally set out to test with the GEGL effects bilateral filter, edge-laplace, and motion-blur. However, in repeated testing, we found that the edge-laplace and motion-blur tests were coming back with identical results on the A8-based desktop platform when running with OpenCL enabled, regardless of whether we were testing with APU graphics or our discrete Radeon HD 7970 card. The 7970 should have blown the APU out of the water, or at least been decisively faster.

Discussions with AMD and developers confirmed our suspicions: we were hitting a CPU bottleneck on the A8. There simply wasn’t enough compute work happening for the GPU to make its presence felt. This raises an interesting value point: if your workloads aren’t sufficiently demanding, depending on how your app is coded, you may not realize as much GPU-assist benefit as expected.

For our purposes, we had to modify our tests in order to increase the processing load to demonstrate GPU compute scaling. We replaced edge-laplace with Gaussian blur, cranking up the Size X and Y variables to 20.0 each. We kept the motion-blur filter, but increased the Length parameter to 100 and Angle to 45. This gave us the following GIMP results.

In these and subsequent tests, you’ll notice the obvious results gap next to our HP notebook where OpenCL results should be—because today’s Sandy Bridge-based HD Graphics engines don’t support OpenCL (and we still haven't been able to get our hands on any Ivy Bridge-based Core i5 machines). Still, we left the Intel platform in this mix for comparison, because there are some cases in which the performance of Intel’s CPU working only in software makes for an interesting counterpoint to GPU-based acceleration. After all, with GPU-assist still in its toddler stage and many applications not yet optimized for the new technology, it’s important to keep one eye on how non-accelerated platforms behave.

In these GIMP tests, though, the benefits of OpenCL-based GPU acceleration are glaring. Even stating the difference as a percentage or multiple seems irrelevant. The point is that without acceleration, these filters are nearly unusable on any system. Workflow comes to a complete stop as the system creeps through adding the blur one block at a time. With OpenCL turned on, suddenly we see very even, expected performance scaling as we edge up from mobile to desktop APU and APU into discrete. Note how it’s not just the graphics processor doing all of the work. Depending on the test, the CPU side still contributes another 20% to 40% to the end result.

Of course, this is true when a suitable workload is present. Remember that we had to modify our original testing in order to expose more noticeable scaling from the GPU. Without that deliberate pressure, AMD's x86 cores stand in the way of greater utilization of graphics resources. We're certain that software developers know what they're up against when it comes to balancing resource utilization, and have to assume that what we're presenting might become a more prevalent condition as developers code for highly parallel operations. Today, expect the impact to be somewhat more muted.

Benchmark Results: AfterShot Pro

As we indicated earlier, Corel was kind enough to supply us with a tech preview of AfterShot Pro featuring OpenCL support. The company really went out of its way to accommodate us, and we’re grateful. Up to present, AfterShot has focused on CPU-based optimization, as described by Jeff Stephens, head of product development for AfterShot Pro and former president of Bibble Labs.

“In AfterShot Pro 1.0, there is zero GPU utilization,” says Stephens. “Years ago, Bibble Labs, which Corel acquired about one year ago, decided to focus on multi-core processing instead of relying on graphics processing. That decision paid off for years. Bibble 4, followed by Bibble 5, and now AfterShot Pro have been and are the fastest RAW conversion applications we've ever tested or seen. That's true not only on a single CPU, but as the user adds CPUs, our scaling is very near linear up to eight CPUs and continues to excel to up 16 cores and beyond. What OpenCL is allowing us to do is to squeeze up to a 2x performance gain out of existing computers by utilizing the GPU that was otherwise idle while continuing to fully utilize as many CPU cores as are available.”

As promised, Corel squeezes twice the performance from our test systems when using GPU acceleration compared to running only through the CPU in software. Actually, OpenCL bestows just over a 100% benefit.

You might notice how our A8-based desktop platform's results are nearly identical, regardless of whether we use the APU's shader cores or a discrete Radeon HD 7970. Sound familiar? But before we jumped to the same conclusion regarding a bottleneck, we went back to Corel with our findings. Working with a platform very similar to our A8 configuration, Corel reported 27.35 seconds using OpenCL and the Tahiti-based 7970 (as opposed to our 32.02) and 36.30 seconds with OpenCL on APU (as opposed to our 31.50). That seems much more in line with expectations. Unfortunately, after confirming identical BIOS builds, driver versions, OpenCL versions, and everything else we could think of, no amount of persuasion would shift our numbers significantly, so we had to publish our own results. Caveat given. Your mileage may vary.

The nature of our preview build of AfterShot Pro resulted in our HP notebook kicking out a “program can’t start because OpenCL.dll is missing” error, and the program would not start—hence no HP/Intel results in this benchmark.

Benchmark Results: Musemage

The amateur family photographer in us was most interested to see how Musemage testing would turn out. Inevitably, we find ourselves at the end of the weekend with dozens of images snapped at some family function or a beach trip or birthday party. While every shot is different, many need bounce flashes toned down, saturation improved, sizes scaled down for emailing, or any number of other alterations. Most often, we blow off this sort of editing because it’s simply too time-intensive. But Musemage offers the promise of reducing such jobs to mere seconds—if it works as promised.

First, we turned to the program’s integrated benchmarking module, a clever nod by the designers toward enthusiasts and reviewers like us. The benchmarking tool loads a sample image pre-stocked inside the application and cycles it through roughly 80 effects. The better the overall processing performance, the higher the score. We can see the huge performance gap between the Radeon HD 7970 card and APU. Clearly, the application does an admirable job of leveraging the GPU for scaling, and circumventing the bus-imposed bottlenecks mentioned by Adobe.

We discovered during testing that Musemage, like Photoshop CS6, does nearly all of its GPU-based acceleration via OpenGL. The only feature Musemage currently codes for OpenCL is HDR processing.

With current drivers, Intel’s HD Graphics 3000 is OpenGL 3.0-compatible (although still lacking OpenCL support), which is why our lowly Intel Core i5 notebook is able to beat every configuration here in software-based HDR processing, even AMD’s FX-8150.

Turn OpenCL back on, though, and results practically drop off the left edge of the chart. It’s a bit odd that our FX-based system with the Radeon HD 7970 card is slightly slowly than the A8 running the same card, but with such fast processing times, 60 milliseconds is probably within an acceptable variance range.

And last up, the test we really wanted to see. As expected, performance scales fairly well up the AMD stack, with the FX/Radeon HD 7970 combo taking about half the time to crunch our eight-image batch as the APU-based notebook did. We were a little surprised to see the Intel notebook slip into the middle of the results, even edging past the desktop A8 configuration leveraging its integrated graphics. This tells us that Musemage is likely coding its OpenGL support for the 3.1 or prior generation, rather than the current 4.x, in order to maximize compatibility with Intel’s large installation base. Note that Intel HD Graphics 4000 supports OpenGL 4.0 and OpenCL 1.1. Still, when you want top OpenGL performance, it’s clear that discrete graphics is the way to fly.

Benchmark Results: Photoshop CS6

Finally, the crown jewel of our benchmark apps: Photoshop CS6.

Again, with no hardware-based support, Intel’s Core i5 puts in a remarkably fine showing, losing out only to our FX/Radeon HD 7970 configuration. But with GPU-based OpenGL enabled, we see performance increase by roughly 200% to 500%. Surprisingly, our A8/APU config turns in the best GPU-accelerated time, and we did not see the same sort of scaling expected when we moved to testing on the Radeon HD 7970.

Not unexpectedly, CMYK takes 10% to 20% longer to process than RGB, but otherwise, the response patterns are almost identical. Adobe’s first swing with OpenCL in Photoshop exhibits very clear scaling across our platforms. From the “low” of our mobile A8 APU to the best-of-breed FX/Radeon HD 7970, we see over a 2x gap, which, in our opinion, speaks fairly highly of the APU’s capabilities. When you can get 50% of the performance of a top-end card essentially for free, that’s a good deal. The desktop A8 APU lands smack between these two, making an even more persuasive case for budget buyers with plans to use this application.

When we step up the blur load to 300, we see CMYK suddenly finishing much faster—go figure. Nevertheless, the scaling pattern remains similar, although we’re now approaching a 200% difference between low- and high-end with GPU-accelerated OpenCL enabled. Moreover, check out how much more benefit GPU acceleration delivers across the board compared to running in software with the workload increase to 300—up to a 15x benefit in our A8/Radeon HD 7970 configuration.

The Picture Is Changing

Add it all up, and the results definitively show that GPU-based acceleration of some sort should be mandatory for anyone with a significant amount of editing work to process. Not only do content creators need to keep an eye out for hardware able to accelerate their favorite applications, but they also need to pay attention to how their software of choice utilizes that hardware. And if the tools you're using don't yet take advantage of GPU-based acceleration, it's worth finding out why. Not all workloads are ideally suited to the sort of parallelism that a GPU introduces. But when it comes to media-oriented tasks, many do, in fact, benefit. The question now becomes how quickly vendors will make this support widely available throughout their wares.

“I don't think the OpenCL API in itself is hard,” says GIMP/GEGL developer Victor Oliveira. “In fact, in my opinion, it is cleaner for general-purpose computation than other APIs like OpenGL and CUDA. Things can get hairy when you have to integrate OpenCL in an existing application that doesn't take performance and parallelism into account. Especially when data processing is split in many functions and you have to put all this in a kernel, that can complicate things and may explain why OpenCL adoption is slow.”

Oliveira expects proprietary acceleration APIs to keep their current footholds in niche vertical markets, such as HPC, because such organizations tend to be more forgiving of proprietary systems. In the consumer world, though, he expects open source APIs to become the dominant, superior paradigm. The more vendors that step up their efforts in this space, the faster the transition will happen.

“I think it's very positive that AMD pushes open standards,” says Oliveira. “It really helps to make developers—at least me—more confident about OpenCL, especially in the open source world. As OpenCL support becomes commonplace, we’ll see more applications like GIMP using it, starting with areas that can easily take advantage of the GPGPU parallel programming model: image/video/audio editing, machine learning, games, and so on.”

“We'll continue to look at all new GPGPU advances, as well as CPU advances, for ways to make our products faster,” adds Corel’s Jeff Stephen.  "Faster doesn't just mean doing the same thing in less time; it also means opening up new options and opportunities that would otherwise be too slow to consider.”

For us, these changes can’t come fast enough. As long as users keep their processing local rather than in the cloud, we see a new breed of need for current-gen systems with GPGPU support, especially in the mobile arena. Previously, we never would have dreamed of throwing these sorts of graphics loads at notebooks, and now heterogeneous platforms are able to knife through them more elegantly. By the time our next heterogeneous compute story is on deck (anticipate a focus on media transcoding tools), we should have the next generation of GPU and APU parts ready, and then...well, we expect awesomeness. But there’s only one way to know for sure.

Where once it bestrode the Internet like a Colossus, Adobe's ubiquitous Flash plug-in has finally begun to fall on hard times. Shortly after Adobe announced its decision to halt development on the mobile version of Flash, a group calling itself 'Occupy Flash' - ignore for now the fact that the same trivializes a rather urgent societal economic problem - has piled in on them in aggressive terms normally reserved for political screeds.

"Flash Player is dead," Occupy Flash's manifesto reads. "Its time has passed. It's buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates."

Occupy Flash's take on Adobe ranges from technical to personal. "It's a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of web technology. Websites that rely on Flash present a completely inconsistent (and often unusable) experience for fast-growing percentage of the users who don't use a desktop browser."

Also singling out security flaws, they're in the same camp with the late Steve Jobs, who started his own spat with Adobe in 2010, calling Adobe 'lazy' and later, publishing a lengthy post on Apple.com, further articulating his beef with the Flash plug-in.

Occupy Flash acknowledges that Adobe, by abandoning mobile Flash to focus on HTML 5 in future mobile development, would appear to have become irrelevant. However, their goal, cheekily focused on encouraging Internet users to deactivate the Flash plug-in in their desktop browsers, is larger than any one company. Simply put, they aim to force a completely open standard on the web by encouraging users to 'invalidate' technologies that don't meet such standards. Will it work? It's a worthy goal likely to be slow-going, at least while so much of the non-mobile web runs on Flash, admittedly render many websites, like Google Analytics, less usable. (Full disclosure - I won't be deactivating Flash, at least not now). But as the intent isn't to kneecap Adobe as an entity, only to speed up the transition to an HTML 5 future, a 'movement', if you can call it that, like Occupy Flash might put pressure on developers to do just that.

How Should You Accelerate Adobe?

Any knowledgeable PC user understands that there are many ways to skin a cat, including when that cat happens to be Adobe’s Creative Suite. Tools like Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and After Effects continue to be favorites for millions of professionals and prosumers. When time is money, the performance levels realized in Creative Suite can mean the difference between making or losing money on jobs. Even if you’re just a home video enthusiast who’s taken to Premiere and After Effects, would you rather spend minutes or hours on a task?

Potentially, this is no overstatement. With Adobe starting to build GPU acceleration into various facets of Creative Suite and better leveraging CPU multi-threading, a system running CS5 today could realize performance an order of magnitude or more better than, say, a five-year-old system running Creative Suite 2 (CS2). We’re not going to state the ridiculously obvious and benchmark just how much faster a new CS5 rig would be compared to CS2. Instead, we want to approach Adobe’s new CS5 from a hardware perspective and examine if and when it makes sense to upgrade from CS4.

After all, the move from the last-generation suite to CS5 is one of the most significant in Adobe's history. Beyond the feature expansion in each app, the company finally embraced 64-bit support, dramatically improving performance in workloads able to take advantage of extra memory. Additionally, there's a good bit of GPU acceleration in play--something we've not seen enough of from other media- and productivity-oriented titles.

So, here’s our scenario. Assume you have CS4 and are considering CS5 as a way to become more productive through getting the same tasks done more quickly. We’re going to examine three possible vectors that could be responsible for this performance increase:

1. Upgrading from CS4 to CS5. This gives you the benefits of shifting from 32- to 64-bit code and addressing extra memory above the 4 GB threshold.
2. Increasing CPU threads. This could be through the addition of cores as well as from leveraging Intel’s Hyper-Threading (HT) feature.
3. Employing CUDA. At this early stage of the industry’s adoption of general purpose GPU acceleration, Adobe has started to weave in support for Nvidia’s CUDA platform. We hope that OpenCL and/or DirectCompute support follows soon, but for now we have to examine CUDA as a case study in what exists today and a harbinger of what will come.

Could it be that stepping up from CS4 to CS5 alone could yield enough benefit to make a hardware upgrade unnecessary? Or will an upgrade to CS5 plus bringing CUDA into play make a $500 processor overhaul mandatory? Let’s try to find out.

The Mercury Playback Engine

While we examine three different applications within Adobe’s Creative Suite (After Effects, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro), most of Adobe’s attention falls on Premiere Pro CS5 and its Mercury Playback Engine, the 64-bit, multi-threaded code base that can utilize Nvidia GPU (CUDA) hardware acceleration. Mercury acceleration is not global throughout the program, but it will accelerate a bunch of effects and operations. For example, the new Ultra keyer, proc amp, Gaussian blur, edge feathering, flips, sharpening, and color correction—in fact, most of the popular effects—are now Mercury-ready. So are three transitions: cross dissolve, dip to black, and dip to white.

Adobe boasts that very large projects can see up to a 10x performance gain from Mercury. Nvidia promises “performance gains of up to 70 times” for visual processing tasks. While we’re more inclined to lean toward Adobe’s number, given some of the GPGPU results we’ve seen in the past, such claims don’t sound infeasible.

Nvidia claims that because CUDA and the Mercury Playback Engine are doing so much of the visual computing work, “the CPU is free to continue to manage other system and application tasks, and to efficiently manage background processes.” On this point, we’ll remain skeptical until proven wrong by our data. We expect that CUDA will accelerate performance when it can, but we don’t expect miracles of CPU utilization reduction...yet.

Turning the Mercury Playback Engine on and off is a fairly simple matter. Simply navigate into Project -> Project Settings -> General. In the Video Rendering and Playback section, use the Renderer pull-down to select the desired Mercury setting.

Hacking CS5 For Cheaper Acceleration

Rather than conjecture about why a given state of affairs might exist between Adobe and Nvidia, we’ll simply state the facts. When CS5 arrived in April 2010, it featured limited acceleration capabilities with CUDA provided you were using one of the five supporting Nvidia GPUs:

• Quadro FX 5800
• Quadro FX 4800
• Quadro FX 3800
• Quadro CX
• GeForce GTX 285

You don’t need the keenest powers of deduction to figure out that the limitation here is one of driver configuration, not hardware. The only architectural difference between the GeForce GTX 285 and the 280 is that the former is based on a 55 nm fab process while the latter uses a 65 nm process. For that matter, the GTX 285 arrived in early 2009, over a year before CS5. 

Admittedly, the GTX 470 and 480 didn’t start shipping until April of this year, essentially concurrent with the CS5 launch. That probably wasn’t enough time for Adobe to validate the 400-series parts for the CS5 launch, so it fell back on the one and only 55 nm part from the prior flagship generation, just for the sake of having at least one consumer part to list alongside those Quadro SKUs, which are what professionals tend to use and what fetches Nvidia a lot more margin. Since then, however, Patch 5.0.2 added GeForce GTX 470, Quadro 4000, and Quadro 5000 support to the existing list.

Hardly a month after CS5 launched, a how-to-hack-CS5 tutorial hit the Web detailing how to unlock the GPU acceleration capabilities of pretty much any CUDA-enabled GeForce card within the Windows version of CS5. We tried it with our GeForce GTX 470 and 480 cards, and it works like a champ on both. To save you the trouble of searching for the process, here it is in a few easy steps:

1. Locate the GPUsniffer.exe file in your system. This will likely be located under C:Program FilesAdobeAdobe Premiere Pro CS5GPUSniffer.exe. Run CMD from the search bar, then execute the GPUSniffer.exe command. Under “CUDA device details,” you’ll see your GPU noted. Write this down exactly as it appears listed, including all spaces and upper/lowercase distinctions.

2. Run the Windows Notepad app with Administrator privileges. From the Start menu, within Accessories, right-click on Notepad and select Run as administrator. Use Notepad to open the file cuda_supported_cards.txt from the same Premiere Pro CS5 folder as in step 1. Add your GPU to the short list of existing Nvidia GPUs, then resave the file with the same name in the same location.

3. Right-click on the Windows desktop and run the Nvidia Control Panel. Under Manage 3D Settings, go to the Program Settings tab. In the “Select a program to customize” pull-down, select Adobe Premiere CS4. (Yes, you may actually be running CS5. Apparently, the driver doesn’t know the difference. Or it’s a typo. Either way, it works.) Under “Specify the settings for this program,” scroll down to “Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration” and select Compatibility performance mode. Click Apply.

As of this writing, Nvidia has slightly expanded its official list of supported desktop solutions for CS5:

• Quadro 5000
• Quadro 4000
• Quadro FX 5800
• Quadro FX 4800
• Quadro FX 4800 Mac
• Quadro FX 3800
• GeForce GTX 470
• GeForce GTX 285

Obviously, if you want to use a GPU not listed here, the CUDA/CS5 hack won’t be officially supported by vendor techs if you need help.

Test Configuration

To isolate the impact of scaling core counts, we picked the Gigabyte board for its ability to enable anywhere from one to six active cores in the BIOS. We chose to examine results using two, four, and six cores. For each of these, we tested both with and without Hyper-Threading enabled, giving us essentially six different (logical) thread count scenarios. This would also hopefully help us see how much, if any, benefit there is to having Hyper-Threading in play with CS5. 

Figuring that most people running Creative Suite would be unlikely to purchase a Core i3, we left Turbo Boost enabled across all tests. Note that when we measured CPU ranges, it was done by waiting ten seconds after launching the test and observing utilization for at least two minutes total across multiple areas within the test run. The lowest and highest observed utilization values were discarded unless seen to repeat at least twice.

Having 12 GB was important for us, because in upgrading from CS4 (or earlier) to CS5, we’re assuming that one of the main draws is to also make that leap from 32-bit to 64-bit and leverage the increased memory addressing that comes with it. When testing CS4, we still have 12 GB of system memory in the configuration, but the applications only access the first 4 GB of it. In one sense, this muddies the waters a bit since we’re effectively changing the hardware resources utilized along with the applications, but ultimately we decided this best reflected a real life decision process. If you’re going to pay for a CS5 upgrade, odds are high that you’re going to increase your memory along with it, and 12 GB is a sweet spot for triple-channel memory kits in today’s high-end systems.

We also debated for a while over the storage devices to use here. Ultimately, we decided to use Intel’s widely respected G2 SSD to house our OS and applications, while all data and scratch disk targets were placed on the OCZ RevoDrive.

After Effects CS4

Our first step in this article was to pick up where Chris Angelini left off in his July look at the Intel Xeon 5600-series. Chris started with 12 threads on a Gulftown chip and worked his way up to 24 threads on a pair of Xeon X5680s. Counter-intuitively, he found that workload completion performance decreased as processing capability increased.

“After Effects CS4 only has access to 4 GB of system memory—a third of what these Xeon boxes bring to bear,” he wrote at the time. “As you add execution resources to AE’s pool, less and less memory is available to each processor, be it logical or physical. The result is a lot more swapping to solid state storage, which is fast, but nowhere near as quick as three channels of DDR3.”

Rather than scale up the CPU chain into workstation configs, we scaled down from the consumer-class flagship, Intel’s Core i7-980X with all features enabled, to only two threads—two 980X cores with no Hyper-Threading. This lowest-end arrangement should more closely resemble some of AMD’s Athlon II processors.

In his story, Chris noted keeping the multiprocessing option in After Effects enabled, as this gave the fastest results in AE CS5. With multiprocessing, AE crunches on different frames with multiple cores. Without multiprocessing, every available core works on a single frame until it’s finished. We decided to run the tests both with and without multiprocessing to better see how much impact adding cores/threads would yield.

As you’ll see more clearly in a moment, After Effects CS4 clearly dislikes Hyper-Threading. In all of our tests with HT and multiprocessing disabled, AE’s overall CPU utilization hovered in the teens and 20s, but the even-numbered threads—the logical cores created through HT— were barely touched. With only two active cores (four threads), there was a bit more activity on the even threads, but still nothing like the utilization seen with multiprocessing enabled in the application.

How does this processor utilization translate into real performance? The data is clear: After Effects CS4 performs much better with Hyper-Threading disabled, sometimes by a factor of 2-to-1. In everyday usage, it would be silly not to run the app with HT off and multiprocessing enabled provided you weren’t multitasking. The exception to this rule would be if you’re multitasking, because running with multiprocessing and HT enabled will save about 20% to 30% in CPU utilization, leaving enough room to run something else concurrently.

Interestingly, Chris noted that “in CS4, we got our best results having all cores working on each frame,” meaning that having multiprocessing disabled yielded faster performance. That was not the case here. In all instances, using multiprocessing yielded much faster results, and the more threads we used, the wider that performance gap became.

So keeping multiprocessing enabled is a foregone conclusion. That decided, what can we observe about thread scaling? Without HTT, we see only a moderate improvement as threads increase. (In fact, there is effectively no difference between four cores and six.) From two physical cores to six, we gain only 29 percent. The punch line here is that two physical cores actually outperforms 12 logical threads by 7.5 percent. Hyper-Threading is just that bad under AE CS4.

After Effects CS5

Recall from the last page that the fastest time we had for our custom workload under After Effects CS4 was 2:55 with six cores active, multiprocessing enabled, and no Hyper-Threading. Achieving this effectively redlined the CPU. In After Effects CS5, this is nearly our slowest score (the difference between 2:55 and 3:00 being negligible), and it was achieved with only two cores, no multiprocessing, and no Hyper-Threading. Interestingly, the same settings under CS5 yielded a CPU utilization range of 66 to 80 percent.

We see that CS5 does not share CS4's revulsion for Hyper-Threading. Apparently, HT delivers more benefit when fewer physical cores are present, but at least there’s no significant negative impact from having it enabled. Neither do we see CS5 delivering that weird CS4 phenomenon of hammering performance when both HT and multiprocessing are enabled.

We have a hard time imagining many dual-core Intel owners rushing out to buy CS5, so if we set those results aside momentarily, we’re left with the fact that there’s no real benefit from Hyper-Threading here. Yes, there can be a slight gain from HT, but not enough to warrant a processor upgrade. This is clearly a case where increasing physical cores is what matters.

Weirdness starts to reappear when we examine CPU utilization. Time and again when working with the CS5 collection, we witnessed fewer cores working harder. It was like watching a track star say, “You know, I’ve got 12 threads, and I’m so far ahead, I think I’ll just take it easy.” At first, we thought the explanation must harken back to Chris’s earlier CS4 assessment in which more cores are being forced to work with smaller shares of the total RAM pool, even though we jumped from an effective 4 GB to 12 GB. However, we got another answer from Nvidia technical marketing manager Sean Kilbride:

“A lot of it is timing related. Video encoding in particular has a lot of serial operations. You need the result of one frame before you can move to the next. This is generally because encoders create a keyframe which has all the frame information. Frames that follow only record the portion of the frame that has changed since the last keyframe. If too much has changed, you have to create a new keyframe.

So the processors can never work too far ahead, since they rely on the keyframes to be created first. In theory, encoding to an uncompressed format could go very quickly on the CPU with multiple threads as long as each frame was a keyframe. In reality, you'd end up crippled by disk I/O because of the resulting massive file size.”

That all said, we’re glad to see multiprocessing making effective use of the CPU in order to bring work times down.

Overall, we’d say that the best bang for the buck in AE CS5 is a quad-core with HT and multiprocessing enabled. This delivers most of the chip’s potential performance while still leaving loads of available processor bandwidth for other tasks.

We have not examined CUDA acceleration in these After Effects tests because Adobe has yet to code for it. The application does support OpenGL acceleration, which we used across the board, but that’s different than the GPGPU boosting we wanted to examine here.

Photoshop CS5: Scaling And Rotation

Photoshop was one of the first applications to hop on the multi-threaded bandwagon during the shift from single- to dual-core CPUs. One of our biggest questions was whether Photoshop has scaled well on the desktop as core counts have gone up. Additionally, we wanted to see what impact enabling or disabling OpenGL acceleration in the GPU would have on our custom workload. Admittedly, this falls outside of our testing objectives, but it still keeps with the spirit of improving Adobe Creative Suite performance in hardware, and should provide an interesting comparison for those who still wonder if GPGPU acceleration is really “that much” better.

In testing Photoshop, we used a single-image photo collage measuring 20K x 20K (1.12 GB) and interpolated it to 50K x 50K (6.98 GB), figuring this would soak up most available RAM without spilling out into a swap file. We then took the interpolated file and rotated it 45 degrees. Being representative of both test sets, we kept and show below the CPU utilization observed during the rotations.

This is more about proving a concept than mimicking a real life workflow need. Photoshop may be relatively good at interpolation, but the dimensions we used were really aimed at creating run times meaningful enough to be measured. You’d be more likely to use smaller levels of interpolation across batch jobs—increasing dozens of image sizes by 20% with a single command, for example.

In a situation somewhat similar to our HT and multiprocessing setup with After Effects CS4, we see several situations in which enabling OpenGL hardware acceleration slows down processing when Hyper-Threading is disabled.

Our four-core, non-HT test shows a strange performance spike with OpenGL enabled, but otherwise we see two- and four-core scores all within two seconds of each other. Only with 12 threads when HT is enabled do we see a respectable gain.

On rotation, Hyper-Threading reappears as an occasional enemy. Eight threads with OpenGL enabled wins this test on a bang-for-buck basis.

Again, we see frustratingly low CPU utilization during Photoshop rotation. Only with two active cores does the CPU get a fair workout.

Photoshop CS5: CUDA

Maddeningly, Photoshop CS5 still does not support any native CUDA-accelerated functions, leaving us in the same boat as After Effects...until we realized that some plug-ins for Photoshop actually use CUDA. Sweet! When we found Digital Anarchy’s Beauty Box Photo plug-in, it was love at first sight.

The skin smoothing tool is subtle but freaking awesome in its ability to convincingly wipe years off of portrait subjects with only a few clicks. Not surprisingly, such post-processing takes a fair bit of work, and we decided to push Photoshop to exhaustion by throwing a massive 29 000 x 14 577 portrait at it.

Based on our prior testing work with CUDA, these charts shouldn’t come as a surprise, but we never get tired of gaping at the benefits of a solid GPGPU implementation. Without CUDA, we again see a 5% to 10% performance hit from enabling Hyper-Threading, and the jump from two cores to four shows much greater gains than from four to six. Turn on CUDA, though, and nothing else matters. Our job finishes right around three minutes regardless of HT or core counts. Without CUDA, the best Photoshop can manage is 12 minutes. The difference is like night and day.

Without CUDA, CPU utilization remains high, gaining only a little breathing room as core counts increase. Despite impairing performance somewhat, Hyper-Threading does help lower the floor on utilization and bring down average CPU load.

With CUDA, our benchmarking times may not change, but CPU utilization plummets. This would indicate that the GPU could now be the bottleneck and the load that’s left for the CPU is now being shared among more cores, dropping the average utilization. This is important to note if you need to run other apps alongside a batched Photoshop work load, for instance.

Note that there is CUDA support for encode acceleration under Photoshop CS4, but it requires purchasing the Elemental plug-in and will only work if you’re running a compatible Quadro card. Unlike the text file hack we detailed earlier, there is no simple work-around to get past the Quadro requirement for CS4.

Premiere Pro CS4

We wanted to leverage as much of the work done by Chris Angelini in his “Can Your PC Use 24 Processors?” story as possible, so in addition to his custom After Effects load, we also replicated his Premiere Pro work set. Part of this job involved created a custom setting scenario in which the 23.976 FPS default Blu-ray speed (24 FPS in CS5) was doubled to 59.94 FPS. As Chris did, we recorded both the render time as well as the export time with Premiere’s Adobe Media Encoder (AME) in order to assess two key parts of the video workflow process. The single point where our test data replicates Chris’s render and AME times within 20 seconds (980X with 12 threads and HT enabled) confirms that we’re on the same track and working with solid results.

In a workstation setup, Chris didn’t see much positive scaling when moving from the i7 into the Xeon line. Working solely with the i7 and modifying core counts, we see a much more obvious and rewarding progression. Once more, you don’t get as much kick in the move from four cores to six as from two to four, but the benefits of each core increase are clear. Moreover, we see the 10% to 20% benefit from enabling Hyper-Threading that we’ve been expecting all along. Without a doubt, the six-core Intel approach is the way to fly with Premiere Pro CS4.

Unlike our other two Creative Suite apps, Premiere Pro makes much more effective use of all available processor cores, including virtual ones. We don’t see any real breathing room with utilization appear until we hit 12 threads.

Premiere Pro CS5 (Render)

With Premiere Pro CS5, which is really the centerpiece of this story, we have to delve a little deeper. Here we finally have the ability to assess Adobe’s Mercury Playback Engine and see it handling 64-bit code, many threads, and CUDA acceleration all at once.

First, let’s compare render times between the two application versions. You’ll recall that with Hyper-Threading, CS4 scored times of 10:17, 5:21, and 3:33 with four, eight, and twelve threads, respectively. In a strange fit of coincidence, these are almost the exact times we saw under CS5 with HT disabled.

Re-enabling HT under CS5 again gives us that 10% to 20% boost. Thus, we can infer that the move from the earlier to the present Premiere Pro will only net you about a 15% improvement, give or take depending on your core count.

Now, when we turn on the Mercury Playback Engine, it’s like hitting a rocket’s launch button. Adobe’s 10x claim turns out to be spot on. With only two physical threads, Mercury and our GeForce GTX 480 are able to blast through our test in 1:36—less than half the time of our best score with 12 threads under CS4.  With all threads and Mercury in play, CS5 sizzles to completion in just 29 seconds.

We didn’t record CPU utilization for this set because the usage patterns would have been meaningless. Most of the time, utilization hovered in the 98% to 100% range, but every so often there would be a downward spike into the teens or single digits. Noting the range would not have given an accurate representation of average resource use.

Premiere Pro CS5 (AME Export)

Keep your eye on the numbers. Our worst AME export time in Premiere Pro CS4 was 26:03 (2 cores, no HT). The best was 8:59 (12 threads, with HT). The counterpart numbers with CS5 were 17:34 (2 cores, no HT, no CUDA) and 4:15 (12 threads, with HT, with CUDA). Obviously, this is an improvement, but we feel a bit let down, as if saying, “Well, our monthly trade deficit with China is only $35 billion instead of $45 billion.” That’s an improvement, yes, but not really the stunning win we all hoped for. The shift from 32-bit to 64-bit and all the additional memory that came with it plus the occasionally epic benefits of the Mercury Playback Engine only managed to deliver a roughly 2x benefit here.

A 2x improvement is far from the 10x gain we saw in the render test, but keep this in perspective. If you were a contractor making $300+ an hour for video production, would you pay $1,500 to cut your export time in half? In a heartbeat, right? Even at 5:27, the quad-core configuration with HT and CUDA shows a substantial improvement over our CS4 test. And to be fair, as noted earlier, we used frame doubling in our Premiere Pro test, which is why the results here are less impressive. That frame doubling work is being done in the CPU. A GPU-based acceleration would have yielded considerably faster exporting.

The upshot here is that you want at least quad-core with Hyper-Threading and you want CUDA, which means you also want CS5.

The refrain on the CPU utilization score is that if you want to look at anything more than a maxed out system doing nothing but exporting in CS5, you’d better have at least a 12-thread CPU in action. Every other configuration spent most of its time in the upper 90s.

Conclusion

CUDA is not a cure-all. As our tests showed, there are clearly some tests that showcase CUDA’s benefits more than others. Depending on how apps and plug-ins are coded, CUDA can help with processing effects, compositing video clips, scaling, blending, and similar functions. In some areas, though, don’t expect CUDA to offer much help. For example, say you have a 1280 x 720 clip in WMV format that you want to transcode into 1820 x 720 MPEG-4 via Premiere Pro. The GPU will be of little if any benefit in this case. All of that heavy lifting is done in the CPU.

On the other hand, if you want to take three 1920 x 1080 clips, color correct them, perform luma adjustment, add drop shadows, composite into a single stream, then downsample into a 1280 x 720 MPEG-2 file for DVD export, the benefit from GPU-based acceleration can be enormous. If you’re stepping up from 30 to 60 frames per second through frame doubling, then CUDA won’t help, but if you get that doubling through tweening (Premiere’s method for automatically adding or modifying one or more frames between two existing frames), then CUDA can slice the generation time substantially. If you want one more example of this, check out these stand-alone results we got for Premiere Pro CS5 exporting done on Nvidia’s own “Paladin” workload, which uses many more GPU-based effects:

We mentioned Nvidia’s Sean Kilbride before, and we want to give him one last shout out, because his help at all hours, day and night, over the span of weeks, set a new bar in vendor patience. His assistance is what made this article possible. Interestingly, though, one of the questions we asked him was, “If the direct export and render queue functions in Premiere Pro CS5 do the same job, but direct export is faster, why do we still have the queue in CS5?” He replied, “Because you can’t continue working when doing a direct export.” With all of our test data in hand, we’d argue that you also can’t continue working during a render, at least not without 12 threads at your back and a not-too-demanding set of secondary apps in front.

Our original question was how best to accelerate Adobe’s Creative Suite. In After Effects, the move from CS4 to CS5 was a clear win, while scaling from four cores to six offered surprisingly little benefit. Photoshop CS5 is likewise mushy on its core scaling benefits, but if you can land a plug-in that supports CUDA, baby, hold on—the improvement is massive. Most of all, Premiere Pro performs exactly as we’d expect. The video editor scales well as threads increase, improves with Hyper-Threading, makes good use of the jump to CS5, and runs CUDA like nobody’s business in the Mercury Playback Engine. If Premiere Pro is your life, it’ll make good use of every improvement you can throw at it.

CNet yesterday reported that Microsoft had edited what appeared to be a stock photo of three business people for its Polish site. While the original, untouched version appears on the US website and shows an Asian man, a white woman and a black man; an edited version of the same photo appears on the Polish website and shows a white man's head on the black man's body. The black hand resting on the table remains unchanged.

When asked for comment, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNet that the company was looking into details of the situation and apologized, adding that the image had been pulled from the Polish site.

Check out the images below or read the full story here.

Image Credit: CNet News

Art Studios Entertainment, the company behind the EFiX device that we covered a while back, just launched a competition to design the interface for the EFiX USB device. The company also says that the winner of the best UI design will receive $5000 USD in cold hard cash.

Check out the contest here.

The EFiX was launched a while back, with much excitement in the hackintosh community. The device simply installed into a USB header on a motherboard and allowed users to install Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard without the need for hacks, cracks or system modifications.

Those in the hackintosh community know that more often then not, their systems are unable to form normal system updates without preparing the system. Because the kernel and other areas of Leopard are patched in a hackintosh setup, a major system update could render the entire setup useless. More recently, there have been ways around this annoyance. However, with an EFiX module, you’re not running a "hack"-intosh in even the most basic sense of the word. There’s just no hacking to do. Build a system based on the EFiX hardware compatibility list, and you’re up and running. Perform all system updates as you would on a real Mac.

OS X aside, the EFiX is definitely not an OS X install device. It’s designed to allow easily installation of almost any operating system. From legacy BIOS operating systems like Windows XP to EFI-based setups like Leopard, the EFiX module handles them all. The process is seamless and non-intrusive. This means there’s no emulation layer of any kind, and the host operating system interacts with your hardware directly.

We interviewed Davide Rutigliano, CEO of Art Studios a while back. Davide sent us several EFiX modules to give away, and that’s about to launch soon as well.

Our full review of the module is nearly complete, with a full comparison between our custom built rig and an equivalent Mac Pro. Full results in the review, but what we can tell you is that our custom built EFiX rig, running Leopard, smashes the Mac Pro — and for a lot less money. But of course, you all knew that [grin].