Article about programming plugins

Enrique -- thanks for the great article! I'll comment on some of the points:

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Filter Forge - This is a newcomer and it is simply amazing.

Absolutely, positively true!

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The best is that you don’t need to know how to program at all. Filter Forge is a visual developing tool based on pre-build components that you have to connect forming a path that leads to a specific result which can be a texture or a image filter.

I'd add that for a plugin programmer Filter Forge can be an excellent prototyping tool -- it allows to focus on the algorithm and eliminates the need to code all the necessities first (rendering code etc etc). Plus, it already has many well-known image processing algorithms implemented as components.

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There is one drawback: You can’t create standalone plugins. Instead you create image filters or texture generators that run inside Filter Forge. But the results are so stunning that you won’t care about that.

One of the reasons why Filter Forge doesn't create standlone 8bf filters is that it uses HDRI images licensed from Sachform (http://www.sachform.de) for lighting, and our agreement with them does not permit embedding these HDRIs into stand-alone filters. Here's the link to an earlier discussion on this topic:

http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/soft...rge-2.html

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The program is in a Beta phase, but you wouldn’t tell that. It is more stable than the vast majority of release version applications.

Yes, the number of bugs we found during the public beta was surprisingly low -- especially for a project that has over 210 000 lines of code.

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PROS: Too many to mention here. A true winner.

Hehe -- fully agree with this

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CONS: None that cannot be fixed in the release version. Perhaps it is slow on some complex filters.

Regarding the speed -- yes, Filter Forge can be slow on some filters. On the other side, it scales very well with multi-core processors -- we've seen speedups over 96% per core. Dual-cores are already mainstream, quad cores are coming next year, and Intel promises 16 (or was that 32?) cores by 2010, so you can be certain that Filter Forge will get faster every time you upgrade your PC

Thank you again for the excellent article!

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» Inno Setup - A great windows installer tool.

I second that -- Filter Forge uses Inno Setup as well.